This is somewhat related to another post I just started (Top Ten conerns). I noticed in the top ten list a number of swimmers (generally very fast swimmers) who swam their first nationals (or any other masters meet) in 5 years due to being in a new age group. I state this by looking at the past few years top ten lists and not seeing their names. Is this a good thing for masters swimming? Swimmers whose only affiliation with masters swimming is showing up to one meet every 5 years to break a record. These records should be owned by people that are true masters swimmers.
What is a true masters swimmers?- Perhaps doing a few meets a year might work. When I swam on an age group team as a child, I know in order to qualify for our championship meet, we had to swim at least 3 regular meets. Perhaps a rule like that for Nationals could begin to fix this problem-
If not, many of our national records will be held by "ringers"
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I kind of doubt they only do one meet every five years. But probably many of the top stay out of the big meet, in order to age up and show up at it maybe every five years. I reason this because at I recently swam a meet and their was a huge gap between my 50 meter time and 100 meter breastroke. I did a lot better in the 50 meter. I have forgotten how you pace a 100 meter since the last time I swam a 100 yard breastroke in a race was 1977 in community college. It also might be that I'm still out of shape and can only hold it together in a 50 meter breasstroke.
I kind of doubt they only do one meet every five years. But probably many of the top stay out of the big meet, in order to age up and show up at it maybe every five years. I reason this because at I recently swam a meet and their was a huge gap between my 50 meter time and 100 meter breastroke. I did a lot better in the 50 meter. I have forgotten how you pace a 100 meter since the last time I swam a 100 yard breastroke in a race was 1977 in community college. It also might be that I'm still out of shape and can only hold it together in a 50 meter breasstroke.
