WHY the rule this year regarding 1000 OR 1650 but not BOTH?
I have been swimming both, back to back, consistently, in championship meets (and BTW placing in the top 10) for several years. Distance is my forte and it's simply not fair to restrict a swimmer from doing both, especially if they can "handle" it. There are all sorts of qualifying rules, a simple restriction / requirement on times could solve any perceived problems by the meet administrators. IMHO this is NOT FAIR....:(
Suz,
For National Championship meets, the Championship committee has to make an assesment, based upon the facility, location, course and expected number of entries, if there will be enough time to allow swimmers to enter both since the events are on the same day. It is not an easy calculation to make months out but experience has given them a good base. The last thing we want is to have the event going into the very late evening of the first (or last day). While it wasn't the distance day, my wife and I started a day at Stanford in 198? with me in the first event and her in the last heat of the 500 free at 10:30 PM. Not fun. I hope this helps.
Leo
Right, all, however tightening up time restrictions / qualifications could solve those issues.
You maintain not allowing swimmers to swim both the 1000 and 1650 isn't fair, so how then would it be fair to have time standards only for these events?
Suz,
If you do the math, it cannot work out. Just did a little calculation. Assuming the following:
1 heat of each age group
13 age groups (19-24 through 80-84)
average 1650 heat: 25 minute
average 1000 heat: 14 minutes
If you let all swimmers swim both it will take 17 hours of pool time (8.5 hours if you have two courses) for just 208 swimmers. Now if you want to let more than 208 swimmers participate (assuming an 8 lane pool) then you have to restrict swimmers to one event since it would not be fair to limit the entry so that you don't have the enough entered to give out all of the places (which I in fact did since we give out 10 places and I only assumed 8 swimmers).
Leo
Actually no flaws since I said "let's assume" in order to get an order of magnitude estimate and there was no assumption about seeding just the average time it takes the last swimmer in each heat to finish - a tough one to guess if you have someone take an hour to finish the 1650!
A couple flaws in your calculations, though, Leo. For one thing the heats in these events are seeded by time, not age group. This speeds things up. Also, I think you'd need to look up historical data on how many people actually swim both events. My guess is well over 50% of the total swim one or the other, not both.
Suz,
You're right, it does seem a little discriminatory to force distance swimmers to pick one of the two. I just read through the rulebook (Nationals info is Article 104, section 5) and other than how to seed these events, there isn't much said.
Back in 2004, LCM Nationals in Savannah, Hurricanes Bonnie and Charlie came through town one after the other the same night, which also happened to be the first night of the meet featuring the 800. Because of a tornado warning, they had to stop the meet mid-heat and resume the next morning... Luckily there were only a few heats left, but they were 90min behind the next day. I think they had the 1500 on the 5th day of a 5 day meet.
To add to that, West-Coast nationals meets are very well attended. There are a lot of masters swimmers out there, apparently only few of which come eastward for Nationals, and they all love going to Nationals meets when they're out there. FLL nationals was just over 1500 people, I think Coral Springs was 12-1300. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see 18-2000 people at federal way, especially considering the reputation of the pool.
