Any suggestions out there for an interesting format for a local SCY meet? We have seen a pentathlon, either all 50's and a 100 IM or all 100's and a 200 IM. There are long distance meets etc. What is your fantasy meet? Corkscrew relay? All breastroke 50 - 1000? Anything but free?
Here is Southern California we have an annual swim meet called the CalTech Pentathlon Short Course Yards Meet. Basically everyone swims a 50 of each stroke for time and then the 100 IM. At the end they have an overall winner based on times/places or something like that.
Our college team had a pentathlon every October where it was a 50 of everything and a 200IM at the end. It was fun, even though my backstroke starts sucked (some things never change...). At the end, the Haucker would post the results on the starting end of the pool. A little extra motivation for some ;-) Not surprisingly, our team was VERY strong in the IM events.
Minnesota Masters has a postal pentathlon that I am going to encourage my LMSC to participate in. For IMers, this is pure joy...
One format we are looking at for the Spring of 2009 is a Spring Sprint Meet. This would be 50s and 100s of all the strokes along with the 100IM. We have not determined the event order but the 100IM would be at the end. The idea is to have a fun, fast meet at the start of the year where everybody could get a few (3 or 4) fast swims in.
With pentathalon during yard season we use to train a few weeks before the meet. We'd take a week per stroke so we'd have a fly week a back week, a *** week and a free week. The whole workout wouldn't be the stroke but we'd have drills, kicking and sets geared to mastering those strokes. It was a good way for us non-strokers to learn a new stroke. When I started Masters swimming four years ago I only could swim back and freestyle. I could barely make a 25 butterfly. Now now I love the 200 butterfly.
I like the idea of the pentathalon, but I would also add the 200 free.
200 free
50 fly
50 back
50 ***
50 free
200 IM
Adding the 200 free gives some non-IMers a chance. I also like the teaming aspect, sort of like the gymnastics team competition.
Another format we are looking at is an all distance meet. For SCY that would be 500/1000/1650 freestyle. Each swimmer could only enter one event for the meet.
The idea is to give distance folks more chances to swim their events and to draw triathletes to the meet. We would have this in the spring, before triathlon season begins, so tri folk could get in a pool swim and gauge their speed/fitness.
We don't have a date or venue set...yet, although we are having discussions with some facilities. This could be a recurring meet with several in SCY season in the spring a several during LCM season when it is too hot (in most of AZ) for triathlons.
