A friend is hosting a 1 mile ocean swim in the Atlantic Ocean next month with approximately 250 swimmers aged 9-90. Since the swim has grown over the years, having a mass start has proven unwieldy and he'd like to break up the swim into different waves.
Does anyone have any ideas how to divide up swimmers into different waves? In this case, we don't know the speed of the majority of the swimmers so sending the fast swimmers off before the slow ones (especially due to the large number of beginners) would be difficult to do in advance. Each wave would be given different colored bathing caps and unique numbers (e.g. Wave 1 is 101-199, Wave 2 is 200-299 etc).
I was going to propose having an under-18 wave and a 19-up wave, which would reduce the number of swimmers in each wave somewhat, but any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
If you have timing chips that can capture start time and finish time you could consider a "rolling start" with swimmers starting continuously in small groups over a period. You will still want to seed, fastest first. I have participated in 2 races which used this approach (because of large field, constrained starting area) and it worked well. Although it detracts somewhat from head to head competition, similar speed competitors are seeded close to one another and there still tends to be good competition. Here is an example from triathlon www.youtube.com/watch This race has a "rolling start within each wave" www.chillswim.com/.../
If you have timing chips that can capture start time and finish time you could consider a "rolling start" with swimmers starting continuously in small groups over a period. You will still want to seed, fastest first. I have participated in 2 races which used this approach (because of large field, constrained starting area) and it worked well. Although it detracts somewhat from head to head competition, similar speed competitors are seeded close to one another and there still tends to be good competition. Here is an example from triathlon www.youtube.com/watch This race has a "rolling start within each wave" www.chillswim.com/.../
