Introducing IRL Arena: Compete With Friends and Family — In Real Life

July 14, 2026

Today we’re opening the doors to IRL Arena — an app that turns real-life activity into a friendly competition between the people who can actually trash talk you at dinner.

The idea is simple. Fitness apps are good at tracking you and bad at moving you. A graph of your own miles asks you to race yourself, and yourself is easy to negotiate with. A leaderboard full of your family and friends is a different animal: when someone overtakes you on a Tuesday, you feel it.

So IRL Arena is built around groups, not individuals:

• Arenas — private groups for your family, your riding crew, your coworkers, your cousins. Join as many as you like.
• Your rules — each arena picks which activities score (biking, running, swimming, walking, hiking, strength training) and how many points a mile or minute earns. Make a swim mile worth ten bike miles if that’s what makes your race fair.
• One log, every board — record an activity once and it scores in every arena that counts that activity type.
• The race chart — cumulative points, one line per member, by week, month, year, or all-time. Fresh period, fresh race.
• Managed members — kids without phones get a spot on the board; a parent logs for them.

It’s free, it runs in your browser at app.irlarena.com, and mobile apps for iPhone and Android are on the way — along with Strava/Garmin auto-import, team battles, and badges.

It began as a family spreadsheet challenge that got out of hand (that story is here). Now it’s an app, and your crew’s first month starts whenever you say it does.

Create your arena and send the invite code to the group chat.