How long is a meet?

Now on the reverse end of the spectrum, I did my first LCM meet a few weeks ago. I took times from the March meet, dropped them by about 2 seconds because I figured I had improved myself that much in 3-1/2 months and converted them to LCM. I thought I had darn good, realistic seed times. Now, at that meet I was anywhere between 6 seconds and over 1 MINUTE slower than my seed times even though I worked my butt off. Michelle -- This is also a very common thing. Especially in places like New England, where we just don't have a lot of LCM pools around, LCM seed times for masters swimmers tend to be all over the map. As we have discussed in some other threads, making the switch from SCY (or SCM) to LCM is very difficult. Different people have different "personal conversion factors" due to differences in their strokes, training background, etc. One reason I like seeing the LCM Champs come back is so that people _can_ get some LCM racing experience. At next summer's LCM meet, you'll know better how you might do, since you've got some experience with it now. Your seed times will be better... so will everyone else's. There are lots and lots and lots of reasons why people have not-perfect seed times at meets. As I indicated, we have piles of people with fantastic seed times, including you. We have a bunch of people with "OK" seed time accuracy. What I'm trying to work on are the worst of the worst seed time offenders. These are the people who are consistently sandbagging their events. Or consistently seeding themselves 10 seconds too fast, year after year. These are the people who should know better. Some of these people are on my own team, and I talk to them in person. We have lots of first-timers. That's great. Their seed times are going to be off. That's fine. You need to start somewhere. (Though this is also why we encourage going to mini-meets, to get some racing experience before the big championship meet.) But we want the first-timers to come. We want them to get the experience. -Rick

Now on the reverse end of the spectrum, I did my first LCM meet a few weeks ago. I took times from the March meet, dropped them by about 2 seconds because I figured I had improved myself that much in 3-1/2 months and converted them to LCM. I thought I had darn good, realistic seed times. Now, at that meet I was anywhere between 6 seconds and over 1 MINUTE slower than my seed times even though I worked my butt off. Michelle -- This is also a very common thing. Especially in places like New England, where we just don't have a lot of LCM pools around, LCM seed times for masters swimmers tend to be all over the map. As we have discussed in some other threads, making the switch from SCY (or SCM) to LCM is very difficult. Different people have different "personal conversion factors" due to differences in their strokes, training background, etc. One reason I like seeing the LCM Champs come back is so that people _can_ get some LCM racing experience. At next summer's LCM meet, you'll know better how you might do, since you've got some experience with it now. Your seed times will be better... so will everyone else's. There are lots and lots and lots of reasons why people have not-perfect seed times at meets. As I indicated, we have piles of people with fantastic seed times, including you. We have a bunch of people with "OK" seed time accuracy. What I'm trying to work on are the worst of the worst seed time offenders. These are the people who are consistently sandbagging their events. Or consistently seeding themselves 10 seconds too fast, year after year. These are the people who should know better. Some of these people are on my own team, and I talk to them in person. We have lots of first-timers. That's great. Their seed times are going to be off. That's fine. You need to start somewhere. (Though this is also why we encourage going to mini-meets, to get some racing experience before the big championship meet.) But we want the first-timers to come. We want them to get the experience. -Rick