Actually, I prefer the snake swims to heat swims. The triathlon I did recently used heat swims and it took ~2.5 hours to run all of the heats and that was swimming 2 per lane. If they would've done a snake swim with someone leaving every 5 seconds, the time between first and last swimmer start would have been about 10 minutes. The only problem is that it was a 6 lane, 25 yard pool so the swim would have been only 300 yards instead of 500.