Organising Running & Cycling Events: Entries, Wave Starts, Course Capacity, Aid-Station Supplies & Event Budgets

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Build this year's cumulative registration curve, compare it with last year's curve week by week, forecast the final field with the ratio method and a field cap, and project next week's sign-ups with a linear trend.
• Look up the price window of each registration by its date, pick the fee for the right distance, deduct a fictional platform fee to get the net revenue per entry, and count the entries per window with COUNTIFS on dates.
• Work out how many start waves a field needs, when the last wave goes off, and you seed runners into waves by their predicted finish time with RANK.EQ and ROUNDUP.
• Turn a forecast of finishers per 5-minute window into arrivals per minute, find the busiest window, check the load on a narrow gate and size the number of finish chutes.
• Count the aid stations on the run and the bike course from distance and spacing, plan cups per station with a buffer, convert cups into litres and round the total up to whole boxes.
• Split the shirt order by last year's size distribution with a margin of overs, size the medal order for finishers after no-shows, round the bib order to whole packs and chart the size split.
• Size the marshal posts from the course length, count the sign-ups per role and per shift with COUNTIFS, and work out how many volunteers each role still needs.
• Work out the contribution per entry, the break-even field after sponsorship, the profit or loss for different field sizes, and flag the loss-making scenarios.