We thank everyone who came to the meet, and who tolerated our extremely long sessions. On Saturday, our session ran for 11 hours and 8 minutes. Unfortunately, that "showed" on Sunday, as we had a more scratches than we expected, and it was clear that some people had run out of gas.
For those confused by the 3.5 second comment.... At our meet, we run the heats with about 6 seconds between heats when we get moving in the later heats. What we struggle with is that people want to cheer for people who just finished their races. At the same time, we're stepping people up for the next heat, and want it quiet for the start. So at one point I (tongue firmly in cheek) instructed the crowd that after each race, they had exactly 3.5 seconds to cheer, and then they needed to simmer down and be quiet. :-) We constantly struggle to keep things moving as quickly as we can, while at the same trying to make sure every swimmer in every race gets a fair start.
We will have more results posted tonight, and in a day or two I will have the full seed time analysis posted to see how we did with our seeding this year.
And yes, for the most part, I'm in the booth on the mic and running the computers for the entire session. I do have some help so that I was able to take a 10 minute break on Saturday and Sunday during the first couple of heats of a 200 stroke event. At least I get to be sitting down most of the time. The officials were on deck for 11 hours... standing almost the whole time.
-Rick
We thank everyone who came to the meet, and who tolerated our extremely long sessions. On Saturday, our session ran for 11 hours and 8 minutes. Unfortunately, that "showed" on Sunday, as we had a more scratches than we expected, and it was clear that some people had run out of gas.
For those confused by the 3.5 second comment.... At our meet, we run the heats with about 6 seconds between heats when we get moving in the later heats. What we struggle with is that people want to cheer for people who just finished their races. At the same time, we're stepping people up for the next heat, and want it quiet for the start. So at one point I (tongue firmly in cheek) instructed the crowd that after each race, they had exactly 3.5 seconds to cheer, and then they needed to simmer down and be quiet. :-) We constantly struggle to keep things moving as quickly as we can, while at the same trying to make sure every swimmer in every race gets a fair start.
We will have more results posted tonight, and in a day or two I will have the full seed time analysis posted to see how we did with our seeding this year.
And yes, for the most part, I'm in the booth on the mic and running the computers for the entire session. I do have some help so that I was able to take a 10 minute break on Saturday and Sunday during the first couple of heats of a 200 stroke event. At least I get to be sitting down most of the time. The officials were on deck for 11 hours... standing almost the whole time.
-Rick
