Any good resources or rules-of-thumb to predict race/meet times from training? Do you just use time trials, can you use your 100 base-times, descend sets or pace work? I'm curious as to where I am at early in this season and would like to compare/project that to a meet setting. I feel like once-upon-a-time I had a gestalt for judging practice performance that let me understand where my training was at.
Alternatively, does my question even make sense?
I've been doing a series of test sets over the last 2 years or so. While I can't create a formula from the times in the test set to predict the actual times in the meet, I can generally correlate performance so that, if my times on a test set in year 1 ahead of a meet are then similar to what I do on the same test set in year 2 ahead of the same meet, I expect and have seen my meet times to be about the same.
What I've found personally, though, is that my meet times as a Masters swimmer are WAY better than my training times. That is, when I was in HS & college I could come way closer to meet times in a workout. Now, that's a crap shoot. So, I don't try to extrapolate from an actual training time to a meet time, but I predict a meet time based upon my training times relative to a previous training time.
I've been doing a series of test sets over the last 2 years or so. While I can't create a formula from the times in the test set to predict the actual times in the meet, I can generally correlate performance so that, if my times on a test set in year 1 ahead of a meet are then similar to what I do on the same test set in year 2 ahead of the same meet, I expect and have seen my meet times to be about the same.
What I've found personally, though, is that my meet times as a Masters swimmer are WAY better than my training times. That is, when I was in HS & college I could come way closer to meet times in a workout. Now, that's a crap shoot. So, I don't try to extrapolate from an actual training time to a meet time, but I predict a meet time based upon my training times relative to a previous training time.
