Although I've been swimming since just after h.s., I've never really competed on a swim team or in many organized meets. But my daughter swam in h.s. so I got in the habit of checking local meet results in the sports pages, and still do. I like to see how I would fair with my current times in the various races. Even at almost 56 years old, with a 500m free time of mid-6-minutes, I find that I'd at least be in the race occassionally against some high schoolers. The better times for the boys in this area (Rhode Island) generally tend to be in the mid-5-minute range. But today there are meet results posted in which I could have won all of the freestyle events. And possibly some of the other stroke races as well. But the thing that baffles me most about this particular meet are the winning times for all four of the 100m races. As expected, "usually" the 100 free is the fastest of the four. Followed closely by the 100 butterfly, then the 100 back, and finally the 100 ***. But in this meet the fastest 100 race was the butterfly at 1:03.66. Then, seven seconds back at 1:10.82 is the 100m backstroke. Nearly two seconds behind that at 1:11.9 was the 100m freestyle. Then eight seconds after that at 1:18.8 was the 100m breaststroke. Also odd was that the 200 IM, at 2:18.62 was faster than the 200 freestyle at 2:23.34.
I dunno...maybe all that isn't so uncommon to those of you who've swum competitively for years. I just find it odd.
Dan
In my experience this depends a lot on the strength of the teams involved. Some HS teams are sufficiently small that they can't fill all of the events. Sometimes a relatively weak swimmer will be the fastest representative for the team in one or more events. If this happens for both teams, the event can seem anomalously slow. This happed often when I was in HS. In my own experience, I would often win an event, but when I got beaten it was quite often by a lot. I might swim in the 5:50 range for a 500 SCY free for example, and win a remarkable number of dual meets, but when we went up against a large strong team, I would be beaten by over a full minute!
I thought this was just late 1970s Illinois swimming, but my daughter has started HS swimming here in PA and I've seen the same thing happening. A few weeks ago I noted that a 2:17 WON the boys 200 SCY free for example. I thought, "good grief, I was faster than that last April at 52 years old." By contrast, it took a :49 to win the 100 free at the same dual meet.
In my experience this depends a lot on the strength of the teams involved. Some HS teams are sufficiently small that they can't fill all of the events. Sometimes a relatively weak swimmer will be the fastest representative for the team in one or more events. If this happens for both teams, the event can seem anomalously slow. This happed often when I was in HS. In my own experience, I would often win an event, but when I got beaten it was quite often by a lot. I might swim in the 5:50 range for a 500 SCY free for example, and win a remarkable number of dual meets, but when we went up against a large strong team, I would be beaten by over a full minute!
I thought this was just late 1970s Illinois swimming, but my daughter has started HS swimming here in PA and I've seen the same thing happening. A few weeks ago I noted that a 2:17 WON the boys 200 SCY free for example. I thought, "good grief, I was faster than that last April at 52 years old." By contrast, it took a :49 to win the 100 free at the same dual meet.
