A meet-up is a ride or run your club gets together for — usually just for your club's members, though you can open one to anyone on Aster instead. It lives on the club page's Rides tab (alongside Events), members RSVP with one tap, and a members-only meet-up gets a live map only members can see.
The club page also leads with a next-meet-up hero on its home view: whenever the club has an upcoming meet-up, the soonest one shows first, with one-tap RSVP, so a member's first screen is the thing that matters most.
A meet-up's own page is the same map-first page every Aster event uses — the live map is front and centre, and About, Chat and the post-ride Recap live behind an Info sheet you open from the map. There is no separate "club ride" page design any more; a meet-up is a first-class event that happens to be run by a club.
Create a meet-up
Club admins create meet-ups on a dedicated "New meet-up" page of its own (not an inline form on the club diary):
- Open your club's page and the Rides tab, then tap New meet-up.
- Fill in the form:
- Activity name and the Ride/Run toggle (a running club can schedule a run).
- Date & time — can't be set in the past; the picker shows the timezone it's using underneath.
- Repeat weekly (optional) — see below.
- Meeting point (optional) — where the group rolls out from.
- Pace groups (optional) — type a name and press Enter (or comma) to add it as a chip, e.g. "Fast", "Steady", "Social". These become groups on the meet-up, shown to everyone going.
- Route (optional) — three ways to attach one: pick a saved route (your club's library plus your own personal My routes), upload a GPX, or build a brand-new route in the in-app route builder on the spot. See the club route library for the full detail.
- Who can see this (optional, defaults to just your club) — a chip that opens a sheet with two choices: just your club (members-only — never appears in Discover, and only signed-in members can open it) or anyone on Aster (appears in Meet-ups discovery and anyone can find and join). Most club meet-ups are members-only; see club visibility and sharing for how a public one looks to non-members.
- Joining instructions (optional, behind "+ Add details") — how the ride works: pace, stops, what to bring.
- Tap Create.
If you leave the page with anything typed, Aster asks you to confirm before discarding it — including if you step away to build a route and come back (your form is restored exactly as you left it).
After you create it
A plain meet-up (no competitive format — see below) shows a "Meet-up created" confirmation with the essentials at a glance (name, time, audience, whether a route attached) and:
- Share link — the one clear primary action, so you can get the meet-up in front of people straight away.
- Send notification — pushes an in-app notification (and a push notification, for anyone with the app) to every club member.
- View meet-up / Edit meet-up (opens Manage meet-up) / Create another meet-up (resets the form).
- Back to {club} to finish up.
Beyond a simple meet-up: club races and time trials {#beyond-a-simple-meetup-club-races-and-time-trials}
The New meet-up page defaults to an untimed meet-up format, but the Format picker lets an admin add a competitive format instead — race, time trial, sportive or point-to-point — all still free for a club to run, members-only or public. Choosing one of these turns "Create" into the start of full event setup: Aster takes you straight to that event's Essentials screen to configure gates, registration and the rest, exactly like any organiser-created event. The Repeat weekly toggle only applies to the plain meet-up format — a race or TT is always one-off.
Manage a meet-up {#manage-a-meetup}
Any event manager (the creator or a club admin) can tap Edit from the meet-up's page at any time, including after it's rolled or gone live. This opens Manage meet-up, the same console every organiser uses, with the route, meeting point, audience and (once a route is attached) Milestones all listed for editing.
Milestones on a meet-up route
Once a meet-up has a route, admins can add Milestones — named landmarks along it — from Manage meet-up. Members see them listed on the meet-up page in advance and as markers on the map during the ride or run. Milestones are purely informational until the meet-up is over — see the Club Recap for what happens with them afterwards.
Weekly repeating meet-ups
Switch on Repeat weekly and Aster infers the day from the date you picked (a Wednesday evening ride defaults to repeating on Wednesdays) — tap Change if you want a different day or an end date. Aster then schedules the meet-up for you: the next week's occurrence appears automatically about seven days in advance, so there's always exactly one upcoming occurrence for members to RSVP to. Times follow your club's local clock, so the 6:30pm chain-gang stays at 6:30pm across daylight-saving changes.
Weekly meet-ups keep producing on every club — they're free to run, so nothing ever stops the next occurrence appearing, and nothing is deleted. See club membership and Aster Plus.
"We're rolling"
Once you're within the window before a meet-up starts (from 12 hours before a timed meet-up, or any time for one with "Time TBC"), an event manager can tap We're rolling to confirm the group has actually set off. This:
- Notifies the club that the group is rolling.
- Shows a calm banner on the meet-up page for everyone.
- Freezes the Milestones list for the ride.
It never starts or stops anyone's tracking — each athlete still taps Start themselves on the Go screen. It's a human confirmation for the group, not a control over anyone's ride. It can only be confirmed once per meet-up.
RSVP
Members RSVP with one tap — I'm going from the Rides tab, or the same RSVP control on the meet-up's own page. The RSVP count shows on the meet-up card, and RSVPing is the same as joining any Aster event: when the meet-up starts, you track it like any other ride or run. RSVP'd members who choose not to track still count as attendees. Changed your mind? Can't make it withdraws your RSVP. RSVP needs a connection (it's a registration, like joining any event); tracking itself never does.
When a new meet-up is added, active members get a notification so it doesn't slip by. Aster also sends reminders to members who've RSVP'd as the meet-up approaches — one about a day before ("Ride tomorrow") and one about an hour before ("Ride starting soon") — so nobody forgets they're in.
Who's going — anyone who can see the meet-up (a manager, a fellow member, or anyone who's RSVP'd) sees the list of who's going as an overlapping-avatar row with a "see all" expand. This is a lighter list than the register below, which is manager-only.
The register {#the-register}
The RSVP list doubles as the meet-up's attendance register — many clubs need one for their insurance. The meet-up's creator (and club admins) see, on the meet-up page:
- every RSVP'd participant, and
- whether each of them actually tracked the ride or run,
with an Export CSV button that downloads the register as a spreadsheet file — handy for club records or an insurer.
"Everyone home?" {#everyone-home}
On the meet-up's live map (managers only), an Everyone home? panel gives a glanceable list of where everyone stands:
- Home — finished their ride or run.
- On the road — tracking and recently updated.
- Quiet Xm — tracking, but no update for a while (often just a signal dead zone).
- Not started — RSVP'd but never set off (or their first ping hasn't synced yet).
- Not taking part — marked as not going, or didn't finish (a rare outcome on a meet-up — see the Club Recap).
Important: this panel is informational only. It never ends anyone's activity, and neither can you from here — each person always ends their own ride or run themselves. "Quiet" means "no recent update", not "stopped": athletes in dead zones keep recording on their phone and their trail fills in when signal returns. See offline and no signal.
The Club Recap {#the-club-recap}
Once a meet-up is under way or done, its Recap (in the Info sheet, or its own tab on the meet-up page) turns from "check back after the ride" into the factual story of what happened — members-only, and deliberately not raced:
- Milestone arrival order, if the route had any — who reached each one and in what order, with a gap to the rider ahead. Two riders too close to call apart share a placement (shown as "=2nd", for example) rather than being forced into a false order, and Aster says so plainly when GPS was too coarse to be sure.
- Who came along — attendance, with distance and moving time for anyone who tracked.
- Watch the replay — a link into the existing multi-rider replay of the ride or run.
- If you've done this meet-up before (a weekly series), a private comparison against your own past attempt — visible only to you.
Ending a meet-up normally — reaching the end, or just stopping tracking — marks an athlete as Finished, not DNF. A meet-up has no "race result": it is, in the app's own words, "a shared ride on open roads, not a race." The one way a meet-up records DNF through its own course of events is if it was given a competitive format (see above) and someone formally abandons it — an event manager can still mark someone DNF by hand from the roster if they have a specific reason to, on a plain meet-up included.
Meet-ups are free on every club
Every club gets the full meet-up toolkit for nothing — one-off and weekly repeating meet-ups, the route builder, RSVP, register, CSV export, Milestones, the Club Recap, "We're rolling", pace groups. None of it is paywalled, and the club never pays a subscription. See club membership and Aster Plus for how members join.