Looking at one-hour results, and just finishing New England Masters SCY Championships at Harvard, how is it that older swimmers are getting faster and faster, and pretty much everyone is getting faster and faster compared to a few years ago when there seemed to be more mortal swimmers?
What are older (45+ women; at this point 65+ men) swimmers doing that keeps them at such elite levels? Weights? Extensive training? How much of both? How do they have jobs and families and train? The field of fast swimmers is getting deeper and deeper. Anyone have idea as to why?
I want to know the secrets. Are the people who race now self-selecting more and more as elite swimmers? Has everyone swum all their lives? I know to swim hard you have to train hard, but I am baffled by sudden increase in amazing fast times and so many records getting broken.
At 45+, you can't do "nothing but training." Most bodies just won't support it. I honestly don't think that most women who are fifteen years older than I am but can lap me in the 500 are spending way more time than I am on working out (8-10h per week total, not counting travel time). Some may swim more and cross-train less, because their parents kindly gave them shoulders held together inside by something stronger than old rubber bands, but I don't think that most of them spend way more time overall on fitness.
Absolutely right! I am not the lucky beneficiary of bionic shoulders (or anything else) either.
However, I do know a few with bionic shoulders that train like fiends. But that's probably a minority.
Isobel, most women I know that want to improve need to spend more time lifting and doing core work instead of putting in more pool yardage. IMHO, that is.
Also, the meets don't seem as fun as they were a few years ago; people seem more competitive and intent on bettering their times and less like a community of avid swimmers. Just an impression.
At my first masters meet maybe 20 years ago there was a beer relay. I thought I had died and gone to heaven: THIS is what I had been waiting for all my life!
I should sue for false advertising: there hasn't been one at a meet I've attended since then!
That aside, I am unsure of the difference between being an "avid swimmer" and being "intent on bettering your time." The meets are pretty enjoyable for me, especially since swimming is a pretty small community. At Worlds in Stanford, I bumped into the swim coach I had when I was 14 and living in Greece. I mean, how cool is that?
Possibly middle-aged folk, intent on denying the reality of aging and trying to recapture the glory days, may take meets more seriously than younger folk who are close to their "real" competitive days. I'm no different; as mid-life crises go, it isn't such a bad thing.
Possibly middle-aged folk, intent on denying the reality of aging and trying to recapture the glory days, may take meets more seriously than younger folk who are close to their "real" competitive days. I'm no different; as mid-life crises go, it isn't such a bad thing.
It's a better way to deal with it than getting a Harley and a 20 y.o. girlfriend........or is it? :bolt:
Looking at one-hour results, and just finishing New England Masters SCY Championships at Harvard, how is it that older swimmers are getting faster and faster, and pretty much everyone is getting faster and faster compared to a few years ago when there seemed to be more mortal swimmers?
What are older (45+ women; at this point 65+ men) swimmers doing that keeps them at such elite levels? Weights? Extensive training? How much of both? How do they have jobs and families and train? The field of fast swimmers is getting deeper and deeper. Anyone have idea as to why?
I want to know the secrets. Are the people who race now self-selecting more and more as elite swimmers? Has everyone swum all their lives? I know to swim hard you have to train hard, but I am baffled by sudden increase in amazing fast times and so many records getting broken.
We have a female in the 40-44 age group here in Illinois that gets top ten (heck #1 or #2 times in just about everything she swims) and she has 4 kids. She is truly amazing.
Looking at one-hour results, and just finishing New England Masters SCY Championships at Harvard, how is it that older swimmers are getting faster and faster, and pretty much everyone is getting faster and faster compared to a few years ago when there seemed to be more mortal swimmers?
I also took a look at various meet results I found in the USMS database over the past few weeks, thinking I may do a meet sometime this year. I'd estimate 95%+ of the people who do meets have a decent chance at a top 10 time. Unless my team is unique with an abundance of slow swimmers, that leaves a ton of swimmers who don't do meets. For the lower age groups (say 18 up to 50), we probably only have 20 swimmers who would be in top 10 contention.
So I think it is a combination of what others wrote above....the fast getting faster. And those who aren't or were not fast to begin with, simply not participating. In another thread a few weeks ago, someone provided data that proved only about 25% of USMS members do at least 1 meet a year.
I am back in the pool after 35 years and agree that those who were fast when they were young are fast when they are old. The growth of Masters and Masters coaches who use the modern training techniques now gives us an opportunity that did not exist 10-15 years ago.
I went to my first meet last month. It had a compete mix of abilities with some fast swimmers in each age group. I did notice that the slower swimmers from my team did not show. It was only those who had a swimming background. So, I would say that it was tilted towards those who were more into the art of racing than the pure joy of swimming.
That being said, the overall on deck attitude was very supportive. Sure, there were those really intense swimmers with the full body Speedos who acted as if they were in the Olympics, but I have no problem with that approach.
If you are in your 40s, 50s, 60s etc and train hard, why not set some goals and try to excel if that is your thing? Lord knows that there are waaay too many unhealthy obsessions out there. I do not count swimming as one of them.
I enjoy being back in shape and felling that water slide by. I could care less about my times. I was never an elite swimmer and I simply like to learn by watching their technique. My focus is more on making the harder sets that I could not even attempt a few months ago. That rings my bell.
I will say that after racing, I was able to swim faster in practice. Racing does help those mental barriers fall in unexpected ways.
I'll leave the fast swimming to my daughter. I get more pleasure watching her swim fast than I do trying to better my times anyway.
Rob
We have a female in the 40-44 age group here in Illinois that gets top ten (heck #1 or #2 times in just about everything she swims) and she has 4 kids. She is truly amazing.
That woman is blazing fast! That's just raw talent at work there. Good luck to her at Nats! You Illinois folks know what you're doing!
I appreciate all the replies. But I would hate for masters swimming to get tainted with any PED scandal; it would defeat the purpose of masters! And unless people are doing nothing but training, it's hard for me to understand how at so many meets new records are being set. Also, the meets don't seem as fun as they were a few years ago; people seem more competitive and intent on bettering their times and less like a community of avid swimmers. Just an impression.
if you want to swim fast you have to train smart...90% of masters don't.
Classic case....work, kids, life in general gets in the way of training and I miss a week...so i put in extra the next week...sorry...wrong...its quality and technique and most of all self confidence that transcends miles.
Less is more in masters...thats the "secret".
I agree with carlos...
I think the science of training continues to evolve. I took 8 years off and just started back in this year and am amazed at how much technique and training philosophy have changed in that time. When I swam in high school and college, the training focus was a lot more on crunching out yards. We'd do drills for the first week or two and then off we'd go into mileage. Now, we do drills every practice, and really focus on swimming quality yardage as opposed to quantity yardage.
It also seems to me that quite a few of the fastest USMS swimmers were fast college (even olympic swimmers) back in their heyday. So another thing that I think is happening is a lot of people are coming back after 10-20 years and they are able to leverage the miles and miles they put in early in their life.
The masters swimmers that I know do it because they think swimming is fun and the best way to get exercise. I swim with quite a few top-10 swimmers here in Colorado, and none of them that I know take it so seriously that they'd endanger their health to make it there.
