Sandbagging? TP + Banana Thread

You can do a few things to help "ballpark" your meet times. * Ask your coach Just try to get yourself in the correct heat so both you and the rest of your heat have a good competition. Anything inventive done for other reasons is probably not good sportsmanship. Funny story about my coach's input. He wanted to collect the entry forms for a local meet, and I'd filled out mine with my estimated time for the 50 free (the one event where I figured I wouldn't get lapped, as it was LCM). Based on how I'd done w/ 50s and wanting also to be conservative due to its being my first masters' swim meet, I guessed about 55. My coach, unknown to me, changed the seed time to 48. I only found this out when I got to the meet and while thinking "what a rascal!" I also was kind of flattered by his estimate of my ability. Unfortunately, the problem was that I'd been used to SCY, and as a total swim meet newbie, I had never been in a long course pool. It showed. Got in, kept swimming, swimming, swimming... seemed like forever (given my time, it was close to forever, but I digress). Around 3/4 of the way along, I had to put my head up to look, wondering where the end of the pool had gone. The long course pool was pretty disorienting, and my time was quite slow. Part of me was thinking about the coach, "I'll get him!" But even despite my slow, dead last performance, I still thought it was pretty cool that he saw speed I didn't. I figured even if I couldn't deliver that day, perhaps the time he'd guessed was something waiting in the wings for the right time. So although I wanted to do a small amount of sandbagging (in moderation, you understand), my coach made me an unwitting "anti-sandbagger." Never mind... I was able to capitalize on another long-course rule: that I was the age I'd be on the last day of the year. Thus, I aged up prematurely, and as there was no one else in the women's 55-59 a.g. besides me, I won my age division, regardless of what I was doing with sand. ;)

You can do a few things to help "ballpark" your meet times. * Ask your coach Just try to get yourself in the correct heat so both you and the rest of your heat have a good competition. Anything inventive done for other reasons is probably not good sportsmanship. Funny story about my coach's input. He wanted to collect the entry forms for a local meet, and I'd filled out mine with my estimated time for the 50 free (the one event where I figured I wouldn't get lapped, as it was LCM). Based on how I'd done w/ 50s and wanting also to be conservative due to its being my first masters' swim meet, I guessed about 55. My coach, unknown to me, changed the seed time to 48. I only found this out when I got to the meet and while thinking "what a rascal!" I also was kind of flattered by his estimate of my ability. Unfortunately, the problem was that I'd been used to SCY, and as a total swim meet newbie, I had never been in a long course pool. It showed. Got in, kept swimming, swimming, swimming... seemed like forever (given my time, it was close to forever, but I digress). Around 3/4 of the way along, I had to put my head up to look, wondering where the end of the pool had gone. The long course pool was pretty disorienting, and my time was quite slow. Part of me was thinking about the coach, "I'll get him!" But even despite my slow, dead last performance, I still thought it was pretty cool that he saw speed I didn't. I figured even if I couldn't deliver that day, perhaps the time he'd guessed was something waiting in the wings for the right time. So although I wanted to do a small amount of sandbagging (in moderation, you understand), my coach made me an unwitting "anti-sandbagger." Never mind... I was able to capitalize on another long-course rule: that I was the age I'd be on the last day of the year. Thus, I aged up prematurely, and as there was no one else in the women's 55-59 a.g. besides me, I won my age division, regardless of what I was doing with sand. ;)