I have been trying to come up with ways to con people on my team into racing more during practice. Would you fall for this con if you are typically adverse to getting up on the blocks?
Background: Once a year we have a relay meet and that meet easily has the highest participation of any meet with close to a third of the team entering. Leading up to this meet, I thought it would be easy to convince people to give this set a try since a lot of people attend the meet but have very little practice starting off the blocks and no practice doing relay starts.
The set:
* 4 person continuous relay for 10 minutes.
-- each person will be assigned a number from 1-5.
-- add up the numbers given to each member of the relay
-- the goal for the entire relay is to complete at least that number of 50s in the given time
The coach would assign the numbers based on how fast he thinks the swimmer can swim a 50 with a couple minutes rest. A 5 would be someone who is going to do 30s or faster ('t make achieving the goal any easier than a mixed relay or an all slow relay.
The order of the relay wouldn't matter, everyone should get at least 3 starts off the blocks, it is a good long rest sprint workout and it would expose non-meet participants to the joys of relays and may encourage a few more people to try the meet out.
Would this be fun or horrible?
If your goal is to get "non meet" people to swim in the DAMM relay meet, then I would add more fun to the mix. Most "non meet" people don't realize that there are many skills (such as how fast you can switch equipment) that are required for fun meet. There are the traditional relays, but the fun relays are really why people enter!
You could do all the same as above, but insert a "coach's wildcard", so at random intervals, everyone has to start swimming backwards, kick only, get out and do pushups, etc to mix it up.
If your goal is to get "non meet" people to swim in the DAMM relay meet, then I would add more fun to the mix. Most "non meet" people don't realize that there are many skills (such as how fast you can switch equipment) that are required for fun meet. There are the traditional relays, but the fun relays are really why people enter!
You could do all the same as above, but insert a "coach's wildcard", so at random intervals, everyone has to start swimming backwards, kick only, get out and do pushups, etc to mix it up.
