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 agree that we are busy. But who knows if you can swim as well as when we were younger if we can do the same yardage. I think Laura Val who swims at 5000 x5 days a week and rarely gets sick is the best women swimmer over 50. But some of the other swimmers once they creep into the older age groups start to drop off no matter what they do. Age is a factor and the older we get the harder it is to do times like we did at 15 to 22 years old. I also swam at the level I did between 12 and 13 years old.
I agree that we are busy. But who knows if you can swim as well as when we were younger if we can do the same yardage. I think Laura Val who swims at 5000 x5 days a week and rarely gets sick is the best women swimmer over 50. But some of the other swimmers once they creep into the older age groups start to drop off no matter what they do. Age is a factor and the older we get the harder it is to do times like we did at 15 to 22 years old. I also swam at the level I did between 12 and 13 years old.
