Moving on from nutrition (kind of), we began to talk about the logistics of Stage 1 - Swimming. English Channel, Panama Canal, Strait of Gibraltar... oh wait, how are we going to eat/drink and swim at the same time?!? I mean it's difficult to eat a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich, synthetic or real, without your hands! So, since we were all engineers, we immediately turned to the "biological models". Nicole suggested having a support crew throw bites and blasts at the swimmers... you know, like how they feed seals and otters (good thing I only had half a cup of coffee in me when I did my seal imitation). While interesting, I know that I am barely coordinated enough to swim, never mind trying to catch food and eat it! And we still might need to drink something other than whatever water we are swimming in, because not only is this disgusting, but dangerous if its salt water...
We then turned to how to carry whatever we were trying to drink/eat with us while swimming. A camelback bubble? A sports beans dispensing snorkel? Gel on the inside of a face mask? Then we realized that people do swim long distances... surely they have devised a way to eat/drink something! I mentioned that one of my friends scuba dives... he tried to eat a gel one time while diving... the next time he went to dive, the diaphragm in his regulator was "stuck"! Hmmmm... found a post and an excerpt from a book on nutrition for open-water longer distance swimming. If anyone else has other suggestions, we'd love to hear them. Our "best idea" for getting the right carbohydrate : protein : fluid ratio involved some weird smoothie concoction (puréed roastbeef and bananas... just kidding) in the "camelback bubble". #20
No comments:
Post a Comment