Overview

You define a Start Lane to create either individual start times or start slots. An example of a start slot is a 15 minute slot allowing up to 15 people to start. Start Lanes are then assigned to one or more courses.

The act of creating a Start Lane will create the start times or slots to the definition of the Start Lane. Once that is done, changing the Start Lane definition has no effect on the start times or slots. You can however adjust, add or remove start slots. Deleting a Start Lane will delete all its start times/slots, even if they have entries assigned.

Creating a Start Lane for 15 minute slots

Let’s say you have a local event and you simply want to spread the load in the start area. You can create a single Start Lane with 15 starts every 15 minutes. In this case that gives you 120 starts. You can assign the start lane to all the courses. Job done.

When you save this definition, these start lane slots are created.

Here’s how you assign a Start Lane to a Course:

In Entry Form – Standard Items you need to include the field startLaneSlotID:

Note that in this example we don’t include startLaneName on the entry form because we don’t want entries to be selecting the start lane, only the start block.

Here how it looks on the entry form. Having selected the course, the available start slots are displayed:

Creating a number of Start Lanes for entries to choose their preferred start time

In this example, taken from the 2025 November Classic, we’ll create a number of Start Lanes suitable for a National event. We’ll optimise the Start Lanes to get the best separation of runners per course.  The organiser also wants to:

• end the starts for the longer courses a bit early
• avoid having juniors out in an empty forest at the beginning and end of the event.

Using the course loading from the previous year’s event, this is the scheme the organiser has designed:

Each course will have it’s own Start Lane in Racesignup but, for example, Black and Brown can share the same physical start lane on the ground.

The Start Lane A Black:

How it looks on the entry form:

Note the Start Time tooltip that explains entries are selecting a preferred start time which may need to be changed for seeding or club separation purposes.

The organiser will continue to define the required start lanes using the matrix and then edit the Course records, selecting the relevant Start Lane..

Notes, Tips and Tricks

If there is a chance of running out of slots then you should consider making the Course limit – or Event limit – so that a course with no slots remaining isn’t displayed for entry. If it is, the entrant won’t be able to save their entry.

For an orienteering class competition, the start lane is assigned to the course. When the entrant selects their desired Class, the system knows the Course for that Class and displays the available starts for the Course.

You can make adjustments to Start Lane Slots as the entries roll in. For instance you may want to extend the available starts by 10 minutes. The best way to do this sort of change is to duplicate Start Lane Slots and configure the new one(s) to provide the additional starts.

Once entries start  do not delete a Start Lane.  If you need to make wholesale changes, the best way is to create a new Start Lane with a changed definition, edit the relevant Course records, assigning them to the new Start Lane. Then, if necessary, you can search for and edit the entry records that have selected from the original Start Lane and assign them to the equivalent in the new Start Lane.

For National and Major events, the rules state that actual start times should not be publicly displayed until after entries close. In Entry Form – Standard Items untick “In Public Start List” for startLaneSlotID.

You can ask entries to choose their preferred block, Early, Middle, Late, etc. instead of start minutes. See Collecting Start Time Preference, Early, Middle, Late