Hello everyone,
Usually I stay in lurk mode but I think setting goals, as specific as possible, is a great way to stay motivated.
They don't necessarily have to be time-based, either, but they ought to be something that you can translate into a training strategy. Examples: swimming a 200 fly or 400 IM or 1650 in a meet for the first time (or the first time in recent memory!) is very laudable. As an aside, I usually take my inspiration not as much from the elite swimmers -- as impressive as they can be -- but from the 70+ year old swimmers who tackle difficult events like these. I just swam a meet where a 70 year old swam a 200 fly in something like 5:30. Imagine swimming fly straight for that long a time...at 70 years of age. Pretty amazing.
If you set a time-based goal, make sure you break it down into the (realistic) splits necessary to do it and then base your training goals accordingly. If you want to break 1:00 in the 100 free but can't break 30 yet...well, you need to build the speed/power first before translating it to "easy speed." (In my experience, many masters swimmers have plenty of endurance but don't work enough on race-pace swimming in practice...much as Ande has been preaching.)
When setting goals, adjusting for age can, of course, be difficult; it may be different for others, but I can't come anywhere near my high school or college times. I have been tinkering with a rating system that can help with this; I freely admit to borrowing and refining the idea from a NEM home page (Great Bay Masters, I think). It is at
www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi
I plan on doing more work on it when I can spare the time over the next year, so any feedback would be appreciated. It is, of course, completely free for general use. I intended it exactly for this purpose -- goal setting -- but it can certainly be used for trash talking across genders and age groups...!
Happy swimming,
Chris
Hello everyone,
Usually I stay in lurk mode but I think setting goals, as specific as possible, is a great way to stay motivated.
They don't necessarily have to be time-based, either, but they ought to be something that you can translate into a training strategy. Examples: swimming a 200 fly or 400 IM or 1650 in a meet for the first time (or the first time in recent memory!) is very laudable. As an aside, I usually take my inspiration not as much from the elite swimmers -- as impressive as they can be -- but from the 70+ year old swimmers who tackle difficult events like these. I just swam a meet where a 70 year old swam a 200 fly in something like 5:30. Imagine swimming fly straight for that long a time...at 70 years of age. Pretty amazing.
If you set a time-based goal, make sure you break it down into the (realistic) splits necessary to do it and then base your training goals accordingly. If you want to break 1:00 in the 100 free but can't break 30 yet...well, you need to build the speed/power first before translating it to "easy speed." (In my experience, many masters swimmers have plenty of endurance but don't work enough on race-pace swimming in practice...much as Ande has been preaching.)
When setting goals, adjusting for age can, of course, be difficult; it may be different for others, but I can't come anywhere near my high school or college times. I have been tinkering with a rating system that can help with this; I freely admit to borrowing and refining the idea from a NEM home page (Great Bay Masters, I think). It is at
www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi
I plan on doing more work on it when I can spare the time over the next year, so any feedback would be appreciated. It is, of course, completely free for general use. I intended it exactly for this purpose -- goal setting -- but it can certainly be used for trash talking across genders and age groups...!
Happy swimming,
Chris
