Dec Swim Challenge Rules/Terms

Reposting here. Participants are expected to know and agree to abide by the terms (that means no welching on the losers' terms!).

December Swim Challenges

Rules & Terms

If your 2006 Calendar includes a Spring triathlon, now is the time to resume and/or kickstart your swim fitness training.

Rules/Guidelines

• This is a challenge to promote the attainment of a specific swim distance goal. Any distance over goal (over 100%) will be tossed out for the purposes of calculating the winning team.
• Align yourself with a team. We are lining up regional teams for this challenge but if you find yourself a Challenge Orphan, PM a team captain and ask to join their team or just declare your allegiance. We're not formal about joining a team. Please publicly announce so that you are put on the roster.
• Team members calculate and pledge their swim distance goal for the month of December.  Races and open water swimming applies toward the count.
  • "Swimming distance" includes distance from kick board, paddles and/or fin drills.
  • Open water swims must be measured by a GPS type of device, objective measuring system, or by a sponsoring swim race.
• Team members need to report their goal to their Team Captain by November 30.
• Team Captain must report their goals to Renee (playing dual role of (Winning) Team Florida Force Captain and Challenge Administrator) by end of day November 30.
• Each team will pick a Captain (or you may self-declare) and the Captain is responsible for collecting the weekly swim distance totals from their team members, and reporting said distances to Renee. Final numbers will be independently audited and verified by Pricewaterhousecoopers or, in the event of their slacking, by me.
• Participants must blog their swim training. If it's not blogged, it didn't happen for the purposes of this Challenge.
• Reporting week begins Monday and ends Sunday. Captains, please report weekly numbers by Monday morning to Renee. Please use my email account [email protected] to report your team weekly totals (PM fills up too quickly).

Determining Winning Team(s)

Calculations for determining winning team will be done a little different than in the past. It will be a combination of % of team members who reached their goal + final percentage of aggregrate team goal attainment. In this way, both individual goal attainment and team effort both carry weight. It also levels the playing field (for teams with fewer team members). It will work like this:

• Calculate the percentage of team members who reached their goal.
• Calculate the aggregrate team goal attainment average (throwing out anything over 100%).
• Average these 2 numbers. The team with the highest average of these two numbers wins.

Terms for Losing Teams

As much as I enjoyed all the spanky-butt avatars after the girls whooped the boys in the Original Swim Challenge, this non-gender-specific challenge does not offer the same kind of enticements. Besides, we’ve already done that, we need to do something more clever, original, humiliating, witty.  So, the terms are still somewhat open but the gist of the terms are:

• Losing team members must change their avatar from January 1 to January 31 to an avatar that must be agreed upon by all captains before this challenge commences on December 1.
• Losing team members must include an homage to the winning team in their signature line, precise working to be agreed upon by all captains before this challenge commences on December 1.
• Feel free to contribute your ideas on the avatar and signature line homage.

The ultimate goal is for you to meet your goal. That’s what it’s all about. That, and a little smack talking.  Have a cookie?