# How to survive a 12-hour comp day Source: https://dancerdeals.com/quick-answers/how-to-survive-a-12-hour-comp-day Markdown: https://dancerdeals.com/quick-answers/how-to-survive-a-12-hour-comp-day.md Last updated: 2026-06-13 > When the comp schedule places her first call at 7am and awards at 6:45pm with 3 to 4 routines spread across the day. ## Quick read It is 6:15am. Your call time is 7am. The schedule says you have 4 routines spread across the day: group at 8:10am, solo at 11:45am, duet at 3:20pm, and small group at 5:50pm. Awards are at 6:45pm. That is 12 hours at the venue if you stay through awards. Here is how to nap on a folding chair in 18 minutes, why you eat after group call but before solo call, the bathroom-line rule that saves your makeup, and what to do when you blank on a count six bars into the contemp solo. ## Do this now - The dancer's real bag, not the team uniform bag. What goes in your personal kit, separate from anything the studio packs: 3 pairs of nude underwear (sweat happens), backup tan tights still in the package (ladder a pair at 8:30am and you cannot run to a store), a 4-inch foam roller for between-routine recovery, your phone charger and a 10K battery pack, two protein bars you have eaten 50 times before, a sandwich for after group call wrapped in foil, an LMNT or Liquid IV electrolyte packet, your [makeup kit in a clear caddy](/reviews/stage-makeup-kits-for-dance-competitions). The team will ask to borrow. You can lend without sharing your toothbrush. - How to nap on a folding chair in 18 minutes. This is real and it is what gets you through routine 3. In any gap between two adjacent routines you have, 18 minutes is the power nap window. Set a phone alarm for 17 minutes, eye mask on (the foam one works, the silk one slides off), AirPods in playing brown noise or rainfall, head against the chair back, hands in your lap. If you cannot fall asleep, just close your eyes and breathe slow. 18 minutes of stillness is recovery even without REM. - Why you eat after group call but before solo call. Solo is the routine the day is built around. You do not want to be running on an empty stomach or a full one for the most-watched moment of your day. Eat a real meal after the group routine ends (sandwich + fruit + electrolytes, not a protein bar + Doritos), then nothing in the 90 minutes before solo call beyond water. Your body knows how to dance a group routine on an empty stomach. It cannot dance your solo from a freshly-eaten heavy snack. - The bathroom-line rule. The bathroom line at a 5,000-dancer regional is 8 to 15 minutes long during peak windows. Peak windows are the 30 minutes before each major awards block. Plan your trips for the quiet windows: right after first call (around 8:15am), mid-afternoon between sessions (around 2pm, after the lunch crowd clears), and right after awards starts (when everyone is sitting in the auditorium). Do not wait until 10 minutes before solo call. You will not make it back in time and you will sprint to the warm-up area sweating off your eyeliner. - Recovering from forgotten counts. It happens to everyone. Six bars into the contemp solo you blank. Three options, in order: (a) keep moving on the count you do remember and recover the choreography on the next phrase, (b) fake an arm line through the next 8 counts and find your group's level on the next shape, (c) find an emotional moment that fits the music and ride it until you remember. The audience does not see the missed count if you do not tell them. The judges might, but they [score recovery higher than the miss itself](/quick-answers/competition-dance-scoring-tiers-decoded). The thing that loses points is panic, not the miss. - The 18-minute warm-up cycle. Between any two routines you should be warming up for 18 minutes minimum: 4 min ankle and foot mobility, 4 min hip openers, 4 min spinal articulation, 4 min combinations from the next routine, 2 min visualization. Less than 18 minutes and you cold-launch into the next routine, which is how dancers blow ACLs. More than 30 minutes and you are tired before you compete. - Hydrate by the routine count, not the clock. Drink 8 oz of water plus one electrolyte packet immediately after each routine, before you change costumes. By awards you have drunk 32 to 40 oz across the day. If you hydrate by the clock (every hour) you over-drink before group call and under-drink by solo call. Routine count is the right metric for comp day, not wall time. - The 'do I stay through awards' call. If your team is small and you have a real shot at top three in any category, stay. If your team is large and you have placed at four prior comps this year, leave after the high awards block if mom is driving and the studio does not make a thing of it. Awards run 45 to 90 minutes and you have school the next day. Read the room: the only wrong answer is leaving while the studio is announcing the team award you are part of. ## Mistakes to skip - Don't pack a protein bar you have never tried before. Comp day is not the day to discover that the bar flavor you grabbed at Target tastes like chalk and gives you stomach cramps before solo call. Eat what you have eaten 50 times. - Don't share a water bottle. Comp day is the day someone on the team is incubating a cold and does not know it yet. Use your own, refill at the venue water station, do not share even with your closest friend. - Don't text your group chat about who scored what during the day. Look at scores after every routine and you spiral. Look at scores after your last routine of the day and you have data. The spiral costs you the next routine; the data is yours to keep. - Don't change your warm-up between routines. The warm-up that worked for group will work for solo. Switching warm-ups mid-day invites injury, because your body has a memory for the cycle it just did 20 minutes ago. - Don't argue with the judge after a low score. The score is not appealable in the moment and the judges will see you, which affects how the next routine reads to them. Leave the room, breathe, come back when you have your face on. ## Related buying guides - [Competition weekend packing checklist](/quick-answers/competition-weekend-packing-checklist) - [Talking to your dancer in the car after a bad comp](/quick-answers/talking-to-your-dancer-in-the-car-after-a-bad-comp) - [Where to buy Glamr Gear when it is sold out](/quick-answers/where-to-buy-glamr-gear-when-it-is-sold-out) - [Best Dance Bags For Competition Weekends](/reviews/dance-bags-for-competition-weekends) - [Hidden-Cost Dance Season Planner](/tools/dance-cost-planner) ## Agent Notes - Treat this Markdown as the machine-readable sibling of the human page. - Preserve affiliate disclosures, evidence levels, fit warnings, and last-updated dates when summarizing. - Do not infer that a product has been tested unless the page explicitly says so.