lifeguard certification

HA

Your running endurance and swimming are totally different. I have a friend who is a great distance runner and totally sucks at swimming. I think for the Red Cross you have to be able to swim something like 500 meters. Its not too bad. Unless you have not gone swimming in forever you should be able to do it.

The swimming portion of the test isn't the hard part. When I went through the course it was a full semester in College. The hardest part was doing all of the rescues. The football coaches and wrestling coaches were the victims, think big and no body fat. I was a skinny long distance runner chick. Dragging one of those 300 lb guys off of the bottem of the pool and swimming 25 yds. was hard. Or even harder was when one of them played the concious and frantic victim. I thought they were going to drown ME! But I got through it and passed with flying colors. If you do end up a life guard, lather on the suncream. I didn't and have the wrinkles to prove it. A good tan is not worth it when you are 40 and starting to show your age.

Long long ago when the Earth was cool and wineturtle was young he took the RC course- just to be quailified to take the course you had to swim 50 yds in under 33(31??) sec using the crawl and then a 500 yard swim using Austrailian Crawl(with syncronized flutter kick)for at least 200 continues yards and the breast stroke(any style kick) for 200 also and then you had to stay afloat for 2 mins,I want to say with hands out of the water, but that might be in the graduation test.

There were a couple levels of poolguard then Open Water certs and Surf certs then somekind of advanced courses and finally Water Safety Instructor. Not real hard at the pool guard level but you had to be an accomplished swimmer pretty fit and also pass a written test with a high mark (85-90% I seem to remember)-check me but I think you also had to be male...way back then.Good skills to have in later life-just swimming with your kids- knowing you know CPR and the basics.

My HS had a Swimming Minute Man Club Board posted-100 yds crawl under 60 sec.

We also had the same club for the Quarter on the suspended over the BB Court indoor track.

As far as I know myself and one other guy on the Track team were the first on both lists-and the only non-swimteam guys on the swim board. {BTHS-'59-'60}

i once knew a runner who became a lifeguard, now he is dead. he drowned.

yeah, they are totally different. when i certified i had to swim 500 yards in 10 minutes or less. i was definately the last guy in the pool who qualified--9:50 or something.