XLR8 Olympic Challenge

As we move ever nearer to the Olympic Trials and the Olympic games, a neat idea for a training challenge is to swim the Olympic programme during one training session. That's it, every Olympic event; 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,500 freestyle, 100, 200 back, breast and 'fly, 200, 400 IM and all three relays, 4 x 100 and 4 x 200 free and 4 x 100 Medley, all done by each swimmer. Total distance, if you do both 800 and 1,500, is 6,150m. Add a short warm-up and swim-down and you have a nice 7.0-7.5k session. It all has to be done 'for time' of course and you can use FINA points to set the standard or XLR8 points to compare all your swimmers across the ages. It's better to use points than simply add up the times because then the longer events don't skew the results.

As BOCOG, the Beijing Organising Committee haven't yet announced the swimming schedule you can do the events in any order you wish; you could go random order or short-to-long, or long-to-short, whatever. If you have pool space, you could let each swimmer decide the order independently. Give them a prescribed rest interval, say, one minute, betwen each event and relay repetitions as, say, 4 x 100 with 15 seconds, and away you go.

Set targets and give prizes. If you don't include the reverse distance events you have 13 individual events, that's worth at least an iPod for 13,000 points! Using the FINA points widget you can score the relays but using XLR8 you'd have to add the four repetitions and score as a straight swim equivalent.

A variation could be to repeat the exercise on two consecutive sessions, heats in the evening and finals the following morning, with the goal, of course, of going faster in the morning 'finals'.

If you're really onto it, and seriously serious about distance, you can add a straight 10k as the third session of course :), and, if you want to 'mirror' the World Championships instead of the Olympics, you can add the 'stroke' 50's, as well as a 5k and 25k!