Colonies Zone SCY Championships - Fairfax VA

If it's true that some of the swimmers are entering the 1000 with times of 1 hour and 45 minutes, I've never seen an entry form that had the ability to specify hours. Just minutes, seconds, and hundredths. So someone would have to submit 105 minutes to be entered with that time. It seems like a typo to me. Why? Consider: at an ironman distance triathlon, the cutoff to complete the 2.4 mile swim is 2 hours and 20 minutes, basically 1 mph. If you can't do 1 mph, they may have to pull you out of the water. So that's the baseline for swimming proficiency. 1 mph is about 3:25 per 100 yards. 105 minutes for 1000 yards is over 10 minutes per 100, or roughly three times slower than the baseline. Someone who is actually going that slow might not know how to swim. Or they might be over 90 years old. Or they didn't know what to enter and went with a ridiculously high estimate. Or they just made a typo...

I found this thread from the beginner triathlete website (I have a google alert that searches on championships Masters and swimming). I agree with notsofast - yes it sucks and from 2,500 miles away I dont know the many of the parties involved. But lets look at it a little different way. Are the other 1650 / 1000 events that can be swum in the area? Perhaps the coach of Team Z is trying to support the meet and knew there are limited slots available - we can have a team event, cheer our lane mates and support our LMSC. The meet director is faced with limitations. Pool time costs money and it costs volunteer time - I dont know when the pool is available, but she is going to have a meet that ends at 10 pm and then has to turn around for an early morning opening and you want your meet officials to get a good night sleep before the next day - look what happens when you limit entries. We struggle in our zone for how do you run a championships that will have the distance events. At the last LCM championships, the 1500 started at 9:30 am and finished at almost 6pm (thank goodness for positive check-ins or else it would have finished at almost 8pm (after the 1500 we still had the 800 Free relay and the 400IM). Do you run 2 per lane, then you need 6 timers per lane - you cannot use automatic timing (no splits). I noticed that the 1650 and the 1000 are run at the same time - one being in a deep course and the other in a shallow course - I liked Skip's idea of running the 1000 on a different day, However, there could be a problem as you usually do not want to run two unequal courses together - so what do you do? Run the men in one course and the women in the other? If you do that the first heat of the women and the first heat of the men are going to be very slow which drags the time line (perhaps you say there will be one mixed slow heat). The 1hr 45min 1000 sounds wrong on the face of it - a 10 minute one hundred is almost unbelievable - it could have been a 14:50 1000 where the decimal place got moved - mistakes are made. I once saw a swimmer with a Jewish last name sign up for worlds as a member of the Algerian Swimming federation (the swimmer checked the wrong box) We want to grow Masters swimming, triathletes have told me that they do not get respect from "regular" masters swimmers - look at the blog on beginnertriathlete. We we have a team of Masters swimmers who are also triathletes who abided by the rules, signed up according to the rules and now hear the complaints from "real" Masters swimmers that they are taking "their" spots at the meet (my words not yours). Didn't those Z Team members that "real" Masters swimmers wait until the last couple of days (preferably the last day) to register for the meet? :-) A few years ago, for SCM championships we wanted to limit the length of the meet. In the previous year, we had about 35 people sign up for the 800 free. Ok, lets just limit the 800 to the first 48 (six heats) of swimmers who enter. We had over 100 swimmers enter the 800. In the era of limits, with only 48 swimmers you were sure to score points for your team and maybe score a medal. I think this event is evidence of the rule of unintended consequences. I wish everyone who swims in the colonies meet good swimming and thank you to the meet director and all the volunteers who put on the meet.

Unmitigated self promotion (or Meet promotion) We are having a single event One mile meet on Sunday 24 February 2013 at City College of San Francisco. San Francisco has been a little chilly - today, it is going to be about 50° (10° C) with clear skies. The pool is within walking distance to a BART station, so you can fly in swim (BART serves both SFO and OAK airports) and fly out (or better yet come for the weekend and enjoy our beautiful city). There is a limit on the number of swimmers (96 swimmers but only 25 have signed up so far). So for those of you who want to swim the mile, come on down.- you can get your time for top ten and then be fresh for the Colonies meet. (Distance events at the beginning of a meet just kill me - I hurt the next day and find it difficult to swim fast after a distance event - your times may be different). www.clubassistant.com/.../meet_information.cfm -michael

Found this thread via a triathlete forum: www.beginnertriathlete.com/.../thread-view.asp Got no dog in this hunt, but it sure seems: 1-Everyone who entered is a USMS swimmer. That they participate in another sport is irrelevant. 2-Everyone who entered seems to have followed the rules to do so. 3-Some really good swimmers got shut out, which sucks. Rules should be changed to let faster swimmers get preference next year. 4-USMS should be looking for ways to sponsor 1000- and 1650 events to draw more triathletes to meets and increase revenues. 5-Some (but certainly not all, or even a majority) of the comments here seem to belie the "just-jump-in-the-pool-and-swim-and-you'll-make-lots-of-friends" line I've typically read about entering meets.

Do you think it might be beneficial for your training and for masters swimming in general if triathletes swam other events on Sat & Sunday? Can you not understand our POV? -- we love to have you come to meets and will cheer for you, but it is different to entirely coopt an important champs meet and thereby exclude us from participating. Had all of the members of the Potomac Raiders Swim Club in La Plata signed up and filled the distance races, would it be considered co-opting? Would the race organizers be encouraged to contact their coach and ask them to share lanes? The 45,000 non-competing USMS members are all "real" swimmers. Any of them could have signed up for CZ. If the rules need to be changed for an important champs meet, let's do it! Until then, I'm going swimming.

Full disclosure, I am a triathlete. I am a masters swimmer. I received emails from both my USAT and USMS coaches to sign up for Zones. Go Penguinfan! :chug:

Are there any purely USMS swimmers JUST racing Friday night? Are there any purely USMS swimmers for whom this is their first meet? If the answer is yes to these questions, then the playing field is equal. Equal playing field? Did you read the posts above? The issue is that the 1000/1650 spots are LIMITED. If they were not limited, I would say come one and come all, for sure. Conversely, the events on Saturday and Sunday are wide open with NO limits. Moreover, the pool swimmers competing only one day is likely a miniscule %; this is an important meet for us. So, it's not a comparable or equal situation in any way. This is not like a running event -- there are limited pools, limited pool time, limited spots for those of us who only do one sport. FYI, here are Team Z's stat as researched by Jack: (FXCM is not all triathletes) interesting info i gleaned from friday nites fxcm entries. of the 104 fxcm masters ... 91 are only swimming friday nite, 77 of the 104 have no recorded time in the usms database, another 11 have 1 recorded swim, 7 of which are 3 years or older. Do you think it's right that Team Z grabbed all the spots and that no pool swimmers can compete in their east coast championships meet? (I concede that all rules were followed.) Do you think you should be able to do this every year? Do you think having QTs like Boston would be unreasonable for a champs meet? Do you think Team Z could actually host a distance meet itself instead of hijacking ours? Do you think it might be beneficial for masters swimming in general if you swam other events on Sat & Sunday? Can you not understand our POV? -- we love to have you come to meets and will cheer for you, but it is different to selfishly coopt an important champs meet and thereby exclude us from participating. Couldn't you have gone to the local UMBC distance meet? Nothing can be done about it at this point, but I hope the policy is changed going forward to accommodate both groups of swimmers, not just time trialing Team Z. Now as a sprinter swimming unpopular events, I am exiting the discussion!

Full disclosure, I am a triathlete. I am a masters swimmer. I received emails from both my USAT and USMS coaches to sign up for Zones. My teammates are swimming at USMS practices and competing at USMS meets because we are USMS swimmers. You may know some of us and be unaware of our other lives as triathletes. I am a USMS swimmer specifically preparing for this event, and I registered only for the 1000. There are also USMS/USAT triathletes signed up for multiple days and distances. Are either of these wrong? Are there any purely USMS swimmers JUST racing Friday night? Are there any purely USMS swimmers for whom this is their first meet? If the answer is yes to these questions, then the playing field is equal. USMS swimmers were my inspiration to get back into sports. My hope is we all recognize fellow competitors and welcome and support everyone at the meet. I we wish to change the rules, we can. But lets not lose sight of the spirit of USMS in the meantime. (from our website) Do I have to compete to be a Masters swimmer? No. When organized adult swimming started to become popular in the 1960s and 70s—the early years of USMS—the intent was that adults would swim to stay in shape. But early organizers knew that some adults would want to compete, so it is offered. About 25 percent of our nearly 60,000 members enter pool or open water competitions. The greater percentage of USMS members does not compete.

While I can certainly understand the frustration people feel about being shut out of the event and while I also enjoy poking fun at triathletes for the sole reason that it gets an unfailingly amusing rise out of my triathlete brother, I agree with the folks pointing out that Team Z didn't do anything wrong. I think they are coming from a culture in which events tend to fill up quickly and as such were faster off the blocks to register. I think that looking at changes for the future is certainly warranted and perhaps both factions (and I think penguinfan makes a good point that they are not always as clear cut as this thread makes them seen) could shift their cultures a bit - triathletes to putting more emphasis on the racing aspect of the event as well as participation in more events and swimmers to entering events earlier. I am entering an open water event later this year that is heavy on the triathletes and I can almost guarantee that I will do something out of ignorance to irritate some of them. I did one triathlon a while back and my lack of alacrity through the chute leading to the transition zone from the water did not make me popular. (I was 19th out of the water and finished somewhere around 350, to give you an idea of why this might have been such a party foul. Triathlons are decidedly Not My Thing.)

Some really good swimmers got shut out, which sucks. Rules should be changed to let faster swimmers get preference next year. It does suck that people got shut out of a desired event, but I don't view it as a given that faster swimmers should get preference. Maybe, but it is something that should be debated. Another possibility is to adopt nationals qualifying times (or some variant) and if you don't meet the standard you don't appear on the results, like FINA does at Masters World Championships. But Riccione proved that that concept isn't foolproof; lots of Italian swimmers entered and then didn't come anywhere close to the QT; they didn't care. One idea I heard in response to that is that if a swimmer doesn't make the QT then the swimmer or hisher club gets charged an extra fee (in addition to the swim not appearing in the results).