How long is a meet?

Let's take a 100 Free with 10 heats as an example. I think he means that if you are seeded in a slower heat (you are in the slowest heat #1), you are displacing the slowest person into the next slowest heat (they'd be in heat #2), while they should have been the fastest person in heat #1. This causes a chain reaction all the way through the event, up to the heat you should have been in. When I do meets, I ask my coach for help with my seed times. I may pad them very slightly, depending on that discussion. I'd prefer to be in a heat with swimmers close in speed to make a good race. Obviously, if the event only has 1 heat, you woudn't slow down anything. I see. It's not the 100 free. I guarantee there won't be more than a couple heats of women. I doubt it will have any effect. LC zones are not nearly as well attended as SCY zones here. I think most people, including myself, would generally prefer to be seeded with swimmers closer in speed. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I go to so few meets, and I don't generally think of myself as a negative force in the swimming community. I may drown and have to be pulled from the water anyway. Now I guess that would slow the meet down. :laugh2: Oh, and I don't have any really exact idea what my seed time should be. I've only swum it once before. Seed times are always a real pain for me. I never know how my shoulder or sinuses or training will be. Muppet: I'm all jazzed up for another 50 fly. LC 50 fly is my very fav event!! :bouncing: I haven't checked the form. Are men and women swimming separately or mixed? At least I won't be costing you an extra 30 seconds or so on Sunday when we gotta be gone by 12:30! Something should be done about Mr. Ego. That is ludicrous.

Originally Posted by The Fortress forums.usms.org/.../viewpost.gif It won't slow down the meet. Um, yes it will. If you swim faster than your heat because you're seeded too slow, you _do_ slow down the meet. -Rick I don't see how. Each heat will take as long as its slowest participant. (You know, the "weakest link" syndrome.) My :2cents:

No worries, Fort - As I mentioned earlier, I've done that myself a time or two. I don't have a problem with that. I won't hold your feet to the coals - except perhaps for some 50 fly redemption. :duel: I think Rick has some good ideas here, and I think this tangent got started b/c I mentioned that I can think of a specific example of someone who does get their jollies out of beating people by 30 seconds (I see they're doing it at Nationals again). Ok- there's NO excuse for doing something like that a Nationals! That is just sad. At a big meet like zones or Nats, one should really enter something very close to a best time (at least best for this period in life). Isn't that why they have QTs? I will admit to putting a bit of pad in my 1500 time--only because I haven't done it in a LCM meet (only SCM) and I've found that the conversion tables tend to exagerate my speed. I want to be competitive in my heat and swim with the appropriate swimmers--not blow someone away or look like a drowning 10-year-old. What kind of twisted ego needs to go to a national meet and blow people out of the water by using bogus seed times? If you're fast, swim against the best & prove it. If your not, swim against the best and work hard to keep up. (For the record, I'm in the later grouping.)

As a fellow NEM swimmer I appreciate that you value appropriate seed times as much as I do. There have been many, many meets where I had to choose between two favorite events (usually 200 free and a breaststroke) because they were back to back. I spent my entire high school career unable to swim my second favorite event at the time (100 back) because my better and favorite event always came right afterwards (100 ***). To me, order of events is part of the sport. Otherwise, high point awards and heat winner awards can become meaningless. I have found however, that since I am getting back into things I am improving faster than expected. So for the NEM SCY meet that you have been using as an example, I truthfully seeded myself with best times from my most recent swims in January & February. That meet though, I had a truly awesome meet. 200 *** dropped 1.99 200 IM I created a very realistic seed time and dropped 2.3 seconds. 50 *** I dropped 0.37 (should have been more based on my 100 later that meet) 200 Free dropped 2.28 100 *** dropped a whopping 3.65! (I did a little dance!) I would hate to think that when someone truly has a breakthrough meet they were being labeled as a poor seeder. At the same time, in every heat, even though I had remarkable best times, I was absolutely crushed by at least a couple other swimmers. When they look up and are ambivalent about a 6 second time drop, you know something's up. I know in at least one event it made me seriously doubt my performance during my swim. 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. It came down to not having enough turnless practice. At that meet it wasn't so bad since there was always only one heat of women. Even still, it was humiliating even with my seed times being honest to the best I could know. I would hate to have people think the reverse that I had false representation of how fast I was. Granted, I'll get it right next time. But I think people are HONESTLY wrong a little more than people think. When you don't go to meets every weekend like as an age grouper (or have a coach to time you) it's much harder to anticipate how you'll do at any given meet.

I would hate to think that when someone truly has a breakthrough meet they were being labeled as a poor seeder. Michelle -- I just looked up your results... you are definitely _not_ anyone who is anywhere on my list of people with bad seed times. Your seed times were terrific. You swam a total of 750 yards, and your total cumulative time was 10:59.35 for all five events. Your _total_ "error" in seed times was 11.09 seconds. That means you dropped 1.7% from your seed times. That puts you somewhere in the realm of the 70th-percentile for seed time accuracy at the meet. You were better with your seed times than 70% of the swimmers in the meet. Put another way, for every 100 yards of swimming, your seed times were off by 1.48 seconds, or 0.37 per 25 yards. Wow! If everyone in the meet had seed times that were as accurate as yours, I'd be one of the happiest meet directors around! We're always going to have people dropping time. That's what we hope for! And especially at championship meets, we expect to see time drops. What I'm trying to differentiate are "fantastic swims" and "bad seed times". If you drop a couple seconds in a 200, that's a great swim. If you "drop" 20 seconds in a 200, then you had a bad seed time. -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

How? It may not matter. There might not be more than one heat if men and women swim separately as they do at most zone meets. What aztimm said. By bumping yourself down, you also bump a slower person into a heat that is "too fast" for them. So you don't slow down heat 1, but you slow down heat 2. In a large event, you could theoretically cause a chain reaction that affects every single heat. And it gets worse the longer the event. Often people worry less about their seed times in distance events. Being a minute off in the mile doesn't seem like much. It's not that much. But it adds up a whole lot quicker. I don't want people to think I'm sort of "seed time enforcer". I'm not. I just want people to think a bit about their seed times. Our meets depend on everyone doing their part. If everyone decides to sandbag, it starts to defeat the purpose, too. -Rick

At SC Nats in May I entered my most recent (and best) time for the 1000 free and beat my seed time by 16 seconds. The seed time came from a meet in Feb 07, so there was really no reason to think a swim in May would be a lot faster. Did you taper for Nationals? If so, that kind of time drop isn't surprising. I have a tendency to drop about 15 seconds in my 500 free between my in-season and taper meet times!

I'm against this. I'm against it as well. I don't see a need of requiring absolute best times, etc. My position is that seed times should be "real", and they should be as accurate as possible. Because, in the end.... Let's encourage people to swim and try to improve, not berate them for trying to swim more. I want people to swim more, too. If more people have better seed times, then I can get more swimmers into the meet, and you can swim more events. With lots of bad seed times, I have to cut people from the meet, because there's just not enough time. When warmup is at 8:00am, and the meet starts at 9:00am... by the time 7:00pm comes around and we're getting to the last relay of the day... that's a really long day, and lots of people get cranky. If I said that we could have the same meet, and all of the same swimmers, but finish an hour earlier, would you be interested? -Rick

In an 800 I could easily see beating your previous best by 15 seconds, especially if your comparing tapered to untapered times and long course, which a lot of people swim infrequently. My bad. I just checked my sheets from that day. She dropped 56 seconds! Everyone else came in close to their seed time (I went 4 sec slower) but she dropped major time. I still say sandbagging. Again, seemed to be a team thing. Alison