The gap between dogs is the whole schedule
Take four classes of 34, 26, 41 and 22 entries with posted course times of 52, 48, 45 and 44 seconds. Multiply out and the time actually spent on course is 97.2 minutes. That is the number people quote, and it is barely a third of the day.
Add 25 seconds between one dog and the next and the same 123 runs pick up another 51.3 minutes, so running is 148.4. Add 8 minutes of walkthrough per class, 20 minutes of course change between them and 10 minutes at the start of the day, and the ring finishes 250.4 minutes after it opens — 4 hours 10 minutes, of which the gap between dogs alone is over 51.
| Component | Minutes | Share of the day |
|---|---|---|
| Course time on the clock | 97.2 | 39% |
| Gap between dogs | 51.3 | 20% |
| Walkthroughs, 4 x 8 min | 32.0 | 13% |
| Course changes, 3 x 20 min | 60.0 | 24% |
| Fixed start | 10.0 | 4% |
| Day | 250.4 | 100% |
Under two fifths of the day is a dog on a course, and the other three fifths is gate, walkthrough and course change. That is not a criticism of anybody, it is the shape of the thing, and it is why the two levers that actually move a finish time are the gap between dogs and the course change — not the course times, which are the part nobody controls.
Five seconds is an hour you did not know you had
Five seconds off the gap, across 123 runs, is 10.25 minutes. That sounds like nothing until you run a bigger trial: at 400 runs it is 33 minutes, and at 800 it is over an hour. The same five seconds added, because the gate is slow or a bar keeps needing resetting, costs exactly as much in the other direction. This is the single most leveraged number on the page, and the only way to know yours is to stand at the gate with a watch for twenty dogs and take the average.
Course changes are the other one, and they are lumpier. Five minutes off each of three changes is fifteen minutes, which is real but bounded. The gap scales with entries; the change does not.
More rings does not mean proportionally shorter
The calculator assigns classes to rings longest first, dropping each into whichever ring is least loaded — the standard longest-processing-time rule, and about as good as simple assignment gets. What it exposes is that the day ends when the last ring ends, not when the average one does. Four classes of 51.6, 39.6, 55.8 and 33.3 minutes across two rings land as Excellent plus Masters on one ring and Novice plus Open on the other: 109.1 minutes against 111.3 once a 20 minute course change is added to each. The day is 111.3 plus the 10 minute fixed start, so 121.3 minutes and a 10:01 finish from an eight oclock start, against 250.4 minutes and 12:10 on a single ring.
The idle figure — 2.1 minutes here — is printed because it is what a third ring would and would not buy you. Splitting four uneven classes across three rings does not divide the day by three: it lands at 102.9 minutes, only 18 shorter than two rings, because two rings take one class each and the third ends up with two plus a course change between them — 92.9 minutes on its own. Idle time jumps to 78.4 minutes. A fourth ring finally gives every class its own ring and takes the day to 65.8 minutes, at which point the longest single class is the entire day and no fifth ring can do anything at all.
Where this hands off
This is deterministic serial timing — one thing after another in a fixed order. When arrivals are random and the question is how long a queue gets rather than when a list finishes, that is a different model entirely and it is on the dock capacity and queue calculator. For a timetable where the question is money per slot rather than minutes, see class schedule utilization. If you are walking the courses these classes run, that is the course yardage calculator, and the ring they run in is the ring size calculator.
Questions people ask
What should I use for the gap between dogs?
Your own measurement, taken at your own trial with a watch. It varies with the sport, the class, the gate crew, how often bars come down and how the ring is set up, and no page can hand you a number for it. Time twenty consecutive dogs from the moment one finishes to the moment the next starts, take the average, and use that. It is fifteen minutes of work that will change every schedule you write afterwards.
Where does the course time come from?
From the running order, premium or score table for your own trial — it is a figure the judge posts for that course and that class, and it is different for every one. This page has no course times of its own and does not know which organization you run under. All it does is multiply the number you give it by the entries and add the gap.
Why does adding a ring not halve the day?
Because the day ends when the slowest ring ends. Splitting classes across rings only balances if the classes happen to be the same size, and they never are. The calculator assigns longest first to the least loaded ring, prints what each ring gets, and shows the idle time — the total minutes rings spend finished while another is still running. Once one class is longer than everything else put together, another ring buys nothing.
Does this account for lunch, conflicts or dogs running in two rings?
No. It is straight serial timing: entries times a slot, plus walkthroughs, plus changes. Lunch is a fixed block you can add to the start time figure, and conflicts between rings are a real scheduling problem that this arithmetic does not model at all. Treat the finish time as the earliest the sums allow, not as a prediction of the day.
Is the finish time a target anyone should be held to?
It is a consequence of six numbers you typed, nothing more. The page takes no view on how long a trial day should be, how many runs belong in one, or what any of it means for the people or animals involved. Those questions belong to the organization running the event, to the people doing the work, and where an animal is concerned to a veterinarian.