When the going gets tough, the tough make lists

There's only one way to handle pre-race stress: lists.  The act of listing stuff is soothing, it puts the future into nice tidy rails and gives me something to do right now that doesn't involve drumming my boot against the underside of the laptop until the screen falls out.  So lists it is, and for tri, that's nicely nested.  You get the two main lists: RACE and STUFF.  Now, RACE breaks down easily into SWIM (swimmies, goggles, etc), BIKE (bike, helmet, racebelt, pump, workstand, toolbox #1...) and RUN (run shoes, gel?) plus STUFF (race pack, bodyglide, towel, first-aid kit...).  STUFF, meanwhile, can be broken down into SURF (for 'tis a long weekend in the southwest: board and wettie and wax and "dude!" expression), TOYS (fire and geek, book, strawberry lubricant, music), WEEKEND (the usual crap for a weekend anywhere, clothes and beer and so on), ZOMBIES (machete, trail food, full tank of derv, GPS for geocaches) and TO DO which, naturlich, breaks down into CAT, BEFORE YOU GO!!! and a list for each day of anything particularly startling but which I might otherwise forget in the frenzy of list-making.

The difference between my Capricorn lists and a Libra's lists is that a Libra would stick to 'em.  And they'd have a list of lists called LISTS.  And no ZOMBIES list either.