It was honestly kind of wild that you were seriously ready for a trial like this.
It had started off with just you, Ben, way too many beers, and sort of a crazy research binge on the real life lore behind all those movies and such where people swap bodies. Years of going down deeper and deeper little rabbit holes and doing a lot of self-experimentation, you'd somehow come across the recipe for what you were calling Jump Pills for now. Neither of you honestly knew WHY they worked, you weren't like, chemists, or spirit mediums, or whatever, but through sheer determination and a willingness to keep experimenting, you had a pretty reliable list of 20 or so ingredients. Rare plants, sketchy powders from sketchier websites, stuff you could only find as the coating on incense sticks... but if you blended it all together and packed it down, you had a truly revolting pill you could swallow, and after you did, all you needed to do was make eye contact with someone for a good 10 seconds, and zoom! You just jumped over into their body.
At first all the trials you were doing were just you and Ben. It was a bit awkward, and it honestly wasn't even that novel of an experience. You both had pretty similar scrawny builds, terrible little beards, glasses with very similar prescriptions, but you worked out a consistent recipe for the pills, and you had a pretty good handle on how they worked. You had to make your jump within about half an hour of taking a pill. It wasn't really exact, but it seemed like a given pill had a window of like.... 23-35 minutes maybe? No limit on how long a jump could last though. At least not that you had enough patience to try and work out. Once you and Ben stayed swapped for like a month and change, and you figured if there wasn't any sort of automatic reversal after that long, yeah, it'd always take a second pill to get back.
The weirder thing though was what happened if you took more than one pill at a time... or a double sized one, but that was harder to swallow. You'd have thought that maybe it'd let whoever you jumped into jump into someone else while you were in their body, because however it worked, it was still in your original body's stomach, right? And when you just had Ben to test with, it did seem to work like that. You couldn't get more than 5 pills down at once, but that did allow for 5 consecutive swaps. Eventually though, you invited a couple other friends to test stuff though, Tom, who was clean shaven and hit the gym more often, Rich who... was pretty much the opposite, and Sarah, who was pretty open minded about all this, being a woman and all, but was strictly into women and had pretty hard rules on what was off the table if you swapped with her. Having them along for these little trials gave you more swapping options, and that's how you worked out that, somehow, extra jumps stay with the person who took the pills, not the body. That really would have thrown you if you were scientists or something. Was it super charging your soul or something? Doing some weird neurochemical thing that put like a certain sparky pattern in your brain that switched over? Fortunately, you weren't scientists and didn't have to think about it. You were just irresponsible oddballs with a real niche interest.
You worked out a few other little limits too. Nobody could handle anything past that 5 pill limit. It seemed to apply at both ends. Nobody's stomach could handle a 6th pill within like two days of first taking one, and nobody's mind or soul or whatever was up for jumping more than 5 times in about the same period. On a really heavy testing day, everyone just had to keep count on their "five and five." Confirming those had taken a while. Tim ended up stuck in Sarah's body once for a whole weekend once without either of them personally having a pill because you'd all been swapping all over the day before and the bounce that left him in her was the fifth for his mind. Didn't matter whether you were jumping or being jumped two either, 5 swaps total for a given mind, then you needed a long break.
So naturally, here you were about to do the most stupid and reckless thing you could with the knowledge you'd banked up so far. You and Ben were each going to swallow five pills, and then race from one end of the city park to the other. There were hiking trails, bike trails, and a bunch of mazey bits, so it'd definitely be faster to make a bunch of jumps than to just run it on foot. Assuming you could make the jumps quick enough anyway. You hadn't found an upper limit on distance first, but you also hadn't really practiced making extended eye contact with strangers off in the distance either.
Obviously, this was going to be total chaos. The people you were jumping into would have no idea what was happening, and would almost certainly freak the hell out. You'd all kinda been in agreement to this point not to experiment on anyone outside your circle with this but... you know, it had to happen sooner or later, right? The others were spread around the park, and had a bunch of pills on them. Plan was they'd run up to whoever was screaming, keep'em calm, use some more pills to get everyone back in their right bodies ASAP, and... play it by ear from there. And of course, you and Ben were both hoping to make it to the end in four jumps or less each so you wouldn't be stuck after that 5th jump... but Ben DID have a real competitive streak and you weren't sure if he wouldn't spend all five to land the win.
After all, it wasn't JUST a friendly competition. Loser here was volunteering to play guinea pig for any and every weird use for Jump Pills anyone could think of for the next month. If you lost this race, who knows what that'd mean. You might be stuck jumping into an animal, or doing another long term swap, or messing with the dosage or the ingredients. Sky was the limit. So the question was, what sort of strategy were you going to use here to make sure you win?