The 400 SCY IM requires swimmers to swim 100 yards fly, 100 yards back, 100 yards ***, and 100 yards freestyle is this exact order.
I propose that the total quantity of yards remains the same, but how each individual swimmer chooses to divvy them up within his or her race be left entirely to the strategic wisdom of the athlete.
Traditionalists could, for instance, keep doing 100 per stroke in consistent blocks but rearrange these more to your liking (get breaststroke over with early, for instance, or save backstroke till the end when you want more air.)
Or, more likely, you could mix and match in whatever way you want just so the overall total adds up to 100 yards of each stroke.
For myself, I tend to get very tired on the 4th length of fly, although saving any appreciable fly for much later in the race seems too daunting. I am also slow on breaststroke (except during the underwater pull-outs, for which a decent air supply seems mandatory.) I'd also like to avoid any backstroke turn that requires me to actually touch the wall with my hand.
With all this in mind, I am thinking I might like to approach the race thusly:
75 fly
25 ***
25 fly
25 ***
50 backstroke
25 ***
25 free
25 back
25 ***
25 free
25 back
50 free
There are a couple advantages, I suggest, to allowing swimmers to pick their own order and portion size.
First, each can tailor the race to their particular strengths and weaknesses.
Second, since different swimmers will likely be pursuing different strategies, it would be much more interesting for spectators (and commentators like Rowdy Gaines) to watch (and blather about) the evolving aquatic chess match.
Third, it would require the invention of a new piece of swimming equipage, which would bring new revenue to swimming manufacturers and keep our sport on a solid financial footing.
This new piece of swimming equipage (which, I should probably admit, I have taken the liberty of patenting and will license to manufacturers at very reasonable terms!) is a variation on those plastic lap counter gizmos used in the 500, 1000, and 1650. But instead of just listing laps, it would consist of exactly four parallel counters each with four leafs.
During my race as outlined above, my counter would flip 3 butterfly leafs, then one *** one, then the fourth orange butterfly leaf (signifying this stroke is mercifully finished!), and so forth.
All of which brings us to one further advantage to my proposed new 400 IM, Strategic Version Event: the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, that the swimmer, counter, or both might somehow get confused, lose count, and end up being disqualified as a result. This may be particularly intriguing in the "longer in the tooth" age groups to which I am becoming familiar. NASCAR's tremendous popularity has always depended, in some measure, on misadventure. Why not bring a similar potential for a "wreck" to our sport?
In summary, the use of intelligent strategery would reward the tactical swimmer but only if his or her short term and/or executive memory is strong enough to follow through on the plan even after exhaustion and the "stopping wish" has set in, in my case, somewhere during that early third length of butterfly.
Who is with me? (I am also looking for seed money investors in my four-flapped submersible lap-counting gizmo.)
...I wonder if you, Patrick, think you could swim 400 yards of IM faster by rearranging the strokes as you see fit. To me, an interesting thought experiment. Well, the Swim Devil Masters put on their most awesome Sprinter Spectacular every late Feb/early March and they have an exhibition 100 IM where you can choose to swim it in any order. I have played around with different order there and had believed that starting with breaststroke would be the best as I could maximize my underwater pullout, which is the only decent part of my breaststroke. However much faster that made my breaststroke leg, I ended up horribly behind all the other guys and then faced a wave-pool on the remainder of the strokes. I'd be willing to try another order on the 400 IM, but I doubt I'd change the fly start or the free end. I could possibly see some logic in going fly - *** - back - free to lump the short-axis strokes with the long-axis strokes, but I doubt I'd see much time improvement as I like the ability to breathe like a madman on the backstroke after the fly.
...I wonder if you, Patrick, think you could swim 400 yards of IM faster by rearranging the strokes as you see fit. To me, an interesting thought experiment. Well, the Swim Devil Masters put on their most awesome Sprinter Spectacular every late Feb/early March and they have an exhibition 100 IM where you can choose to swim it in any order. I have played around with different order there and had believed that starting with breaststroke would be the best as I could maximize my underwater pullout, which is the only decent part of my breaststroke. However much faster that made my breaststroke leg, I ended up horribly behind all the other guys and then faced a wave-pool on the remainder of the strokes. I'd be willing to try another order on the 400 IM, but I doubt I'd change the fly start or the free end. I could possibly see some logic in going fly - *** - back - free to lump the short-axis strokes with the long-axis strokes, but I doubt I'd see much time improvement as I like the ability to breathe like a madman on the backstroke after the fly.
