Our team has been challenged to enter an 8 person relay team in a 24 hour swim event. The rules are a little different than I expected, and perhaps our contact was confused about them but they were explained as:
Each swimmer can only swim 50m before alternating with another swimmer
Multiple swimmers from the team can be swimming at the same time
At least one swimmer has to be in the pool at all times for the 24 hours.
I am wondering about the physiology of swimming for that long. Assuming that everyone is roughly the same speed one will be swimming and resting for roughly equal periods. Should one stay aerobic the whole time or push it a little bit anaerobic knowing you have recovery time? Should one plan on rest breaks and if so for how long?
The brute force approach would be to have four pairs of swimmers with each pair alternating for the entire 24 hours. I'm not sure if that is feasible let alone if it would be "fun".
The alternative would be to have some sort of rest/sleep schedule. The question then is how long should the breaks be and how often?
Then there are feeding issues...
Any thoughts?
The funny part is that we were told about this before our swim and we were all saying "I don't know, that sounds kinda crazy" and then after the swim was over we all got out and were saying "that's crazy, but we should do it!". Endorphins I guess!
You could slice and dice this a number of ways. Here's something I thought of that might work well: assign swimmers number 1-8. Have four swimming at all times. For the first hour swimmers 1-4 swim, then for hour two swimmers 2-5 swim...hour five would have swimmers 5,6,7 and 8, then for hour six you'd use 6,7,8 and 1. That way everyone has "shifts" of four hours on, fours hours off. Everyone swims a total of 12 hours. Swimmers 1,2, and 3 each have to do four shifts because their first and last shifts are only partial shifts. Everyone else just does four four hour shifts.
Since only one swimmer is in the water at a time you're really only swimming approximately 3 hours in a 24 hour period. If you think about it that way it doesn't seem too bad. You'll certainly get to practice your start a lot!
I'd recommend swimming considerably longer than 50 meters at a time then. Even if you swim at a moderate pace all that diving in then getting out of the pool will where you down. I think I'd go for at least 200 meters per leg.
Lindsay - Did I read that right, you can only swim 50 meters at a time? That's kinda crazy and certainly adds to the complexity.
I'm interested in how you sort this all out as I'm thinking about organizing a sun-up to sun-down relay this Spring.
maybe the "m" stands for minutes?????? that would make more sense to me
I just got the official rules and the ones we were given verbally had it exactly backward in two respects, the real rules are only one swimmer at a time and a minimum of 50 metres before switching swimmers. That reduces the strategic aspect considerably. Now it's just a matter of how often to rotate and figuring in a break schedule. As Kirk said, it's just three hours of actual swimming each over 24 hours. Hmm, it would still be 12 hours of "duty time" under Kirk's plan though...
I just got the official rules and the ones we were given verbally had it exactly backward in two respects, the real rules are only one swimmer at a time and a minimum of 50 metres before switching swimmers. That reduces the strategic aspect considerably. Now it's just a matter of how often to rotate and figuring in a break schedule. As Kirk said, it's just three hours of swimming each over 24 hours, not that big a challenge other than staying up much of the night. Not nearly as crazy as it could have been. Kind of disappointing really.
i say draw straws.
loser has to swim three hours straight, the rest of you can divide the time up comfortably.
I'd recommend swimming considerably longer than 50 meters at a time then. Even if you swim at a moderate pace all that diving in then getting out of the pool will where you down. I think I'd go for at least 200 meters per leg.
you can get in alot of laps by doing 50's. That's what they are going for. I'v participated in 3 24 hours swimathons. In our individuals swim in the middle of the night alot of people would do a 3 man relay for 45 minutes instead of a 15 minute individual swim. we did it in 50 incriments and we caught up on laps big time by doing this but we stayed in the water the whole time which really helped.
Lindsay - Did I read that right, you can only swim 50 meters at a time? That's kinda crazy and certainly adds to the complexity.
I'm interested in how you sort this all out as I'm thinking about organizing a sun-up to sun-down relay this Spring.
Redbird: the highest number of laps swum in 24 hours wins. I believe most of the other teams will be age group swimmers so our chances are not good.
Another rule is that all starts will be in the water, you need to keep your hand on the wall until the previous swimmer touches the wall. So that eliminates the concern about hauling yourself out of the pool after every 50. I think a rotating three or four person relay doing 50s should be able to maintain the best speed, although I'm not sure if an in the water relay hand off will be slower than a flip turn, so maybe doing 100s would be as fast. Longer than that and it seems like your average speed has to drop. It could be an opportunity to do a lot of fairly fast 50s with lots of rest!
Maybe combine Kirk and Warren's approaches: have three swimmers swimming 50s, and rotate one out every 15 minutes, so you swim for 45 minutes and then have an hour and 15 minutes rest. Or rotate every 20 minutes so you swim for an hour and then get an hour and forty minutes to :snore:
Perhaps a little experimentation is in order...
Oh, and the last time it was run the winners swam 106.55km, which I believe works out to about 40.5s/50m and 13,318m per swimmer.
