Been meaning to post about this for a while. I’ve never really liked this particular nuance of the swimming rules from USAT:
**“4.2 Bottom Contact and Resting. **A participant may stand on the bottom or rest by holding an inanimate object such as a buoy, boat, rope or floating object. Excluding the bottom, a participant shall not use any inanimate object
to gain forward progress.”
I don’t think you should be able to use the bottom to gain forward progress. I noticed lots of people walking during parts of the swim at an Oly distance race this summer, and a buddy of mine who did Spirit of Racine said there were folks in the elite division literally running in shallow water. Now, I know that when laying out the swim course, RDs may have to use parts of the body of water that are shallow enough to dod this, but the swim should still be the swim. I guess I don’t understand why its ok to use the bottom to make forward progress when all other objects are banned.
and people should continuously swim until they are completely on dry land. their feet should not touch sand until the rest of their body is already on shore, and pulling them up the beach- and while we’re at it, might as well force them to make swimming motions all the way up the beach, through the parking lot to T1.
really? if the water is 3’ deep, im gonna stand up, dive forward, stand up, dive forward- till it gets shallow enough to make the running effort easier (say 2’ deep).
If you wanna run through chest deep water- I say go for it.
Who cares? I can certainly swim faster than I can walk/wade/run through water. If someone wants to waste the time and effort it takes to do it, why do I care?
I did an oly distance tri in the Biscayne Bay. The swim is in a channel, and gets very shallow at points. I looked up to site, and saw people running in the water. I thought, “why the heck are they running”. Soon enough, my hands started to hit bottom, and I was forced to stand and run. It was way slower than swimming, and I was completely gassed when I started swimming again (maybe 50 yards running). If people want to run, let them. It’s slower and will just tire them out more.
No need to pile on, but clearly you have not thought this through. In addition to what has already been posted, those people walking or resting on the bottom are not likely to be in competition for awards, so who cares?
You know when you are forced to write one set of rules that apply to the sport in every race at every venue there are likely to be shortcomings like this.
You need to accomodate water entry and exit. There will also be race venues where the bottom is close to the surface at points. A governing organization wouldn’t want to go overboard with the rules such that it destroys a large percentage of current and/or potential race venues.
Yes, wading or porpoising goes against the spirit of the rules, but for USAT to try to rewrite the rules to disallow it would have unintended negative consequences.
And for those of you that say that you swim faster…you don’t know how to porpoise do you? It’s much faster.
There was an Xterra last year like this where the race outcome was affected by it. Craig Evans who usually exits the water with a nice lead had a large pack with him at water exit because the rest of the pros were porpoising in the shallow water and kept up with him.
You can walk the bike course AS LONG AS your bike is with you. So you can walk up a steep hill (just don’t block anyone). You can have a mechanical failure; even if no support crew can fix it, you can still finish the race (of course, it depends on how much of the bike course you have left). But if you leave T1 with a bike, you need to return to T2 with a bike.
It’s stuff like this Xterra example that make sports interesting. People forget that sports evolve. My favorite example was the butterfly stroke in swimming. People originally started swimming butterfly as a faster breaststroke. Eventually the swimming sanctioning rewrote the rules so butterfly couldn’t be swum in breaststroke competitions and created a separate event for the modern day butterfly. This is how things happen, people figure a way around the current rules to go faster and eventually new styles are formed and the rules are rewritten.
Hmmm…you are right…I hadn’t thought about entry and exit at all. Trying to accommodate all possible permutations of when its ok to use the bottom would probably make things too complex in a hurry. It just seemed odd to me that it was ok to run along the bottom during portions of the swim, that’s all.
You should have been at Vineman this year. There were some shallow spots but the whole course was swimable. When I got to the turn around it looked like half the field was walking around the bouy. I had to zig-zag through people who were just strolling along. Second lap was the same. I kept thinking, “I’m swimming why aren’t they?”