A gala is not a training session with numbers on it. It is a whole day sitting on a tiled floor in a very warm building, and the bag has to carry the day, not the swim.
The night before
Pack in the order the day happens: warm-up kit at the top, race kit in the middle, dry clothes at the bottom. Nobody wants to unpack a bag on a wet floor at 8am looking for a cap.
The things people forget
- A second towel. The first one is soaked by race two.
- A spare pair of goggles, still in the packet.
- Something warm with a hood — poolside is warm, the seating block is not.
- Food that is not sweets, plus the sweets.
Name-label everything. In a hall with sixty identical bags, a sewn-in label is the difference between going home with your kit and going home with somebody else’s.
