Bag to life, bag to reality

I felt more than half asleep when I arrived at Roald Dahl Plass early on Sunday morning to help man the baggage area for the Cardiff Bay 10k. I didn't spot the other two runners who had signed up to the mission, so made my way to the volunteer area, picked up my Extra Milers T-shirt, and listened to the morning briefing.

When it was time to head over to the bag drop and my fellow GoodGymers were still nowhere to be seen, I began to question things. Was it definitely this race that we were meant to be helping? Did the community mission even exist at all, or had I just dreamt it? Was I dreaming now?

I decided that questioning my own reality could wait until later, and in the meantime I might as well get on with the job. The process sounded quite simple in theory: the long tent was split into multiple sections based on race number, and each section would be attended by two people. Runners would hand in their bags and we would put them in some kind of sensible order ready for speedy retrieval after the race.

Clients of the 1001-1500 range were initially quite slow to appear, but a major surge as we approached race-time meant that our section ended up less like a neatly ordered repository and more like just a big pile of bags. Luckily we had plenty of time during the race to sort everything out, and by the time the runners were back to collect their belongings, we had settled on an efficient retrieval process. The fact that so many people took the time to say thanks despite being exhausted from the race made it all worthwhile. We were also very happy that everything was claimed by the time we finished. The last thing we wanted was an unidentified item in the bagging area 🤖

As for my fellow GoodGymers, it turns out they were both unfortunately unable to attend at the last minute. I guess I wasn't dreaming after all!