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!
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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.
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.
