2016 Speedo USMS 1-Hour ePostal National Championship

Please check out the latest information on our Facebook page. If you don't have Facebook, the content is here: Welcome to the 2016 Speedo USMS One-Hour ePostal Swim event! This event is your opportunity to see how far you can swim in an hour. Besides giving you a great reason to tune up your distance swimming and get you in great shape for the upcoming swim season, we are looking to run an event that will be easy on the environment, hopefully set a record of its own and give back to the sport that we all love by making a donation to the USMS Swimming Saves Lives Foundation. How are we going to do all of this? With your support, of course! Swim the event and encourage your teammates to do it too. Check back here frequently for event updates. Here’s the link to the event information form. It gives you all that you need to know to participate: www.clubassistant.com/.../meet_information.cfm… Please be sure to register for USMS for the 2016 season before you do the swim. There are all kinds of incentives to do so early…think discounts on all the stuff you want for the coming swim season from a bunch of vendors who support USMS. In case you haven’t registered, here’s the link to USMS registration: www.usms.org/.../register.php What’s this about setting a record? We are hoping to log more miles than ever before for this event. So if you are thinking, “How am I going to go farther than last year when I was younger and faster?” We’ve got some training tips coming from coach Marie that will help you with that. And if you get your friends to swim too, we could get there just by sheer numbers of entrants. Easy on the environment? Yes, way back before we were using computers for everything, this event was very paper and snail mail-dependent. People put their split sheets into an envelope and mailed them in for tabulation. That’s a bunch of mail trucks full of deliveries and who knows how many trees worth of paper. Then results were mailed out; that took more trucks and trees full of paper. Medals were dutifully mailed to deserving recipients. More mail truck trips. You get the idea. Skip ahead to 2016. Yes, results and entries have been electronic for a few years, but we are taking this a step further. Those awards that are weighing down interstate commerce can now be obtained electronically too! If you win an award, you can choose to have us send you a photo of it instead of sending you one in the mail AND we will donate $1 to the USMS Swimming Saves Lives Foundation to recognize your achievement! If you still want to receive a medal, we will do that for you. Jim, our event co-director, has agreed to take it to post office in his Prius. Note that electronic awards will be delivered well before the snail mail version. That’s all for now. So get your carpool together and head off to your local pool to get in some training. On her way off of the deck Coach Marie offered a helpful training tip. Work your walls! A good streamlined push-off can get you a couple of extra feet off every wall. Over an hour that’s going to get you some serious added distance. Remember, we have a record to break.

Training Tip #2 We hope you are beginning to focus your training for the 2016 Speedo USMS 1-Hour ePostal Swim. TAM makes the swim a team effort every year. We begin training for it in November and schedule the swim for the last couple of weekends in January (one for the team effort followed by a makeup weekend). Coach Marie tailors our training accordingly. Plan your hour swim so that you have at least 2 weeks (preferably as much as 6 weeks) to train and prepare. Regardless, give yourself a few days’ rest before the swim with easy workouts, lots of sleep and good nutrition. If you start now you should be working hard, with longer sets and trying to hold your hour pace for 30 minutes or more. You may want to throw in a couple of hairball sets each week where you are swimming faster than your hour pace with minimal rest (just a few seconds between repeats). Your hour swim pace is the goal time that you want to hold for each 100 throughout the swim. Here is a ink to a handy pace chart for the hour swim: www.usms.org/.../1hrpacechart.pdf Plug in the time you hope to do for each 100 and it will tell you how far you will go. Play with the chart and compare the pace to what you are doing in the pool to help find an achievable distance. If you have a goal of a certain distance, find the 100 time that will get you there. For reference: 1:45 100 yard pace = 3250 yards 1:40 100 yard pace = 3500 yards 1:35 100 yard pace = 3750 yards 1:30 100 yard pace = 4000 yards 1:25 100 yard pace = 4250 yards 1:20 100 yard pace = 4500 yards Sample long set: 30 minutes of (100, 200, 300, 200, 100, 200, 300 etc. yd/m) repeats holding your hour pace with 5-10 seconds rest between each distance. Sample challenge set: 9 x 100 on hour pace + 5 sec interval. Descend in sets of 3 from your hour pace. For example, if your hour pace is 1:30, your sendoff interval is 1:35. Do a 1:30 on the first 100 then descend the next two 100’s faster than the first. Your 4th 100 is 1:30 and descend the next two 100’s like you did for 1-3… Hold your same sendoff interval throughout the set.

New year greetings from Tamalpais Masters, hosts of the 2016 Speedo USMS 1-hour ePostal swim! We hope your training for the upcoming event is going well. Coach Marie has us logging many miles in preparation for our swim which we will do in late January. Coach Marie has included a couple of sample main sets at the end of this message. We wanted to pass on our experience with “Swimming Saves Lives” (SSL), the foundation created by USMS to help give non-swimming adults the opportunity to receive swimming lessons at no charge. Last summer, TAM members gave lessons to 14 of our fellow community members who did not know how to swim. Both students and instructors found the experience to be quite rewarding. We are looking forward to doing this again next year. Attached to this e-mail is a PDF of photos and student comments from our 2015 sessions. Check it out! We mention this because we have incorporated SSL into our plans for the 2016 1-hour swim. If you earn a place award, you can choose to decline your medal and TAM will donate one dollar to SSL. (We will also e-mail a picture of your medal to you!) If you want to learn more about “Swimming Saves Lives” or make a donation, follow this link: http://www.usms.org/giving/ As far as training sets…Marie gave us a couple of doozies! All levels can do these sets as they are time-based as opposed to distance. She also reminds us to keep working those walls. Practice makes permanent, so keep practicing good streamlines and breakouts on every turn and they will become a permanent skill for you! Warm up well before you do these sets. Set 1: 30 minutes x 100 repeats on your hour swim pace + 10 seconds* 2 min. rest 20 minutes x 100 repeats on your hour swim pace + 5 seconds 2 min. rest 10 minutes x 100 repeats on your hour swim pace *Example: If you plan to hold 1:40/100 for your hour, your interval for this set is 1:50 Set 2: 3 (20-minute swim), (yes, that’s an hour of swimming!) 100 yd/m easy between each swim. Try to hold your hour pace throughout. TAM Masters Your host for the 2016 Speedo USMS 1-hour ePostal swim

Greetings from Tamalpais Aquatic Masters, host of the 2016 Speedo USMS 1-Hour ePostal National Championship! Originally, we were going to urge everyone to complete their swim by the end of the week as the original deadline for completing the swim was January 31. However, there is now hope for all you procrastinators out there as well as folks who just haven’t been able to make it to the pool to crank out this swim. The following announcement has been posted on the USMS web site: Because of the extreme weather conditions experienced during the month of January throughout the country, the USMS Long Distance Committee has extended the date by which all swims must be completed for the 2016 Speedo USMS 1-Hour ePostal National Championship from January 31 to February 10. Entries will still be due by February 10, 2016. For those swimmers whose birthday occurs between February 1 and February 10, their age will be their age of record as of January 31, 2016. For everyone else, it will still be as of the day they swam, and results will be compiled accordingly. This extension shall apply to all swimmers regardless of their LMSC. We hope this will encourage more swimmers to complete this event and have a little fun doing so. Note that even though the date for completing the swim has been extended, the due date for entries is still February 10 so if you decide to wait until the last day, you will have to register immediately to have your entry recorded! For folks who have yet to register their swim, please make sure you check your split sheets before you enter them into the Club Assistant web site. We are finding that folks don’t always check what their timers have given them, particularly the final distances after their last 500 split. We have seen some amazingly fast, final 100, 150, 200 yards (some bordering on superhuman speed!). It’s a common, natural mistake but we have been following up with folks to ensure they’ve correctly transcribed their times and distances. Thanks in advance for your help with this. For coaches and others who are tracking their clubs’ entries to date, the Club Roster icon on the Club Assistant entry page is now active and available for public viewing. You can sort by Club name and see who has registered. As of this morning, we have processed almost 600 entries with more coming in daily. www.clubassistant.com/.../team_rosters.cfm Last, at this point, we’re not sure additional training tips would be of use but we’ll just pass along the mantras we’ve heard from Coach Marie: Have a plan for your swim Swim your own race First 300 yards will determine your pace for the hour Periodically count strokes per lap to keep a focus on stroke length Most importantly, prior to the swim make sure you rest and hydrate!!! Swim fast and have fun!! 2016 USMS 1-Hour ePostal National Championship Powered by ClubAssistant.com

At my coach's urging, I did this yesterday. I was kind of dreading it, but honestly it didn't hurt as much as a hard 200 or 500! I can see more long distance swimming in my future now; looking forward to the ePostal 3000.