St. Louis, Mo. - The Washington University in St. Louis swimming and diving teams participated in the 17th Annual Hour of Power Relay for Sarcoma Research on Tuesday.
First held in 2006, the Ted Mullin "Hour of Power" Relay honors Carleton College Swimmer Ted Mullin who died in the fall of 2006 from sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer. In its first year, 15 teams participated in the Hour of Power and it has blossomed into an event with more than 7,000 participants consisting of college, high school, club and masters teams.
Each team is asked to raise money for the Ted Mullin Fund for Pediatric Sarcoma Research at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital. Since its inception, participants in the Hour of Power have raised over $960,000.
The Ted Mullin Fund supports research into novel chemotherapy/biology agents, new ways to administer chemotherapy, techniques to visualize more accurately the tumor response in the patient, novel genomics strategies to identify high-risk sarcoma patients, molecular techniques to personalize therapy to maximize benefit while reducing treatment-related toxicity and treatments for metastatic or resistant disease that use the patient's own immune system to attack residential tumors.
Swim Set
The "Hour of Power" swim practice is a dynamic 60-minute relay training session that requires all-out efforts from all participating team members. It is a challenging workout that fuels both team spirit and team energy.
The set up for the "Hour of Power" is as follows: team members are equally divided among the number of lanes to be used. For 6 or 8 lane facilities it is ideal to use every lane. It is also a good idea to have a minimum of 5-6 team members per lane for each relay. All relay swims are completed in 50-yard segments.
There are three primary objectives that must be met throughout the entire "Hour of Power" workout:
- Each swim must be done with an all-out effort - "leave it in the pool".
- At any given time, all the relays need to be on the same length or at least on the same 50 segment. Any stroke may be used and team members may need to shift from one relay lane to another to help maintain the same length/50 segment objective. This objective requires constant communication and teamwork.
- Perhaps most important objective - for high levels of performance to occur throughout this hour, equally high levels of enthusiastic encouragement must be evident at every possible moment. In other words, having significant amounts of cheering and expressive levels of excitement from all team members and coaches is inherently required.
For more information, visit the Ted Mullin Fund website.
