As I am sitting here watching another heat of racing and I am reminded of a trick that one of my Calgary team-mates did to make sitting on the bleachers less sore; he sat on one of our pieces of swim training equipment.

If you have spent a day sitting on bleacher seats at a pool, watching an excruciatingly endless series of 400 heats, you too will have experienced the dreaded ‘bleacher butt’. There is a solution to this ubiquitous problem that I want to share with you because I have empathy for your bottom.

The inner tube my team-mate used was a devise we used around our ankles for drag. His idea was a much better use for this normally evil bit of kit; he used the inner tube to sit on, saving your derrière. Not many of these tubes are used today because the drag is far too much to use for long distances but you can make a tube out of a towel.  This is easy to do, take a towel and roll it, then shape it into a donut.  Then you will have an alternative to the inner tube. You can save yourself from bleacher butt and enjoy hundreds of 400’s.

Sore bottoms! (source: Leo Matsuda blog)