Swimming to Nationals

I have been thinking about starting a club "fitness event" based on a virtual relay swim to Nationals. The basic idea is to track the distance swum during club workouts and between now and next spring cover the distance from here to Toronto (these are Canadian Nationals). I would like to track both individual distance and team distance and plot our progress using online driving instructions from our pool to the pool where Nationals are going to be held. The idea is to get everyone in the club involved regardless of whether they are going to Nationals, provide a motivational tool and sense of accomplishment as people see the accumulated distance they have swum. Hopefully it will get some people psyched up to go, but the real theme is that it is not about the meet, it's about the process of getting there. It seems like it can get as elaborate as we want, we can post information about the places we are passing through or track a particular stroke one week so we can say the team swam from A to B swimming butterfly, or we can keep it really basic and just show where we are on which leg of the driving instructions. I'm thinking of maintaining a web page and having a sheet we would fill in our distances on at the end of the workout. The coach could fill in the total distance for the assigned workout and people could just check off that they finished the workout or write in how much extra or less they did. I'm sure people have done similar things before, how did it work out? Are there things that worked well or that didn't? Any experiences, advice or ideas?