Laravel Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded

I have a many to many relation in my laravel application. The model Competition belongsToMany Location and vice versa.

Now I am trying to provide a functionality where one can add existing locations to a competition.

$competition    = Competition::where('id','=', $request->input('contestId'))->firstOrFail();
$locations      = $competition->locations;
$locationNames  = [];

foreach ($locations as $location) {
    $locationNames[] = $location->name;
}

if (!in_array($request->input('locationList'), $locationNames)) {
    $locationId = Location::where('name','=', $request->input('locationList'))->firstOrFail()->id;
    $competition->locations()->attach($locationId);
}

I need to check wheter the competition already has the location, so I store competition data inside $competition. Afterwards, if the location was not found, I attach the location to the competition.

The problem is the amount of queries that are running; one for the competition data, one for the location to retrieve its id, when it hasn't been found inside the competition locations, and one to store the data when attaching.

This returns an error: "Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded"

What is the correct way of doing so? To minimize the amount of queries needed.

Thanks in advance

For some reason, the error didn't appear when I closed my Sqlite DB browser desktop program. Yet this is very strange, since I had the sqlite db browser app open since the beginning of my app creation.