Ques on seed times

My views are rather well documented on this issue. :-) You should seed yourself with your best estimation of the time you will swim at the meet. In most cases, something along the lines of your best time over the past year or so is probably a good estimate. Sandbagging, IMHO, is bad sportsmanship. The point of having a meet is just that - to meet. The purpose of a meet is to swim against other people and race. You may be happy to swim in heat 1, and lap everyone in the 100 free. But if you belonged in the last heat, there are swimmers who are swimming in that heat who are counting on YOU to be in the last heat also, to race against them. They paid their entry fees on the expectation that they would get the opportunity to race against people of similar speed. If you take yourself out of the proper seeding, then you are hurting their swim. If you want to swim by yourself and sandbag and blow people out of the water... go find a lane in a pool somewhere and do it where you're only dealing with yourself. At a meet, other people expect to race against you. Otherwise, they'd all just keep swimming at practice. Also, those people in heat 1 that you're blowing away -- they don't like that. You're subjecting them to embarrassment for your own self interest. Not cool. At the Masters champs that I run, we explicitly reserve the right to adjust your seed time if it is obviously incorrect. Last year, we started a contest at our championship meet to see who could have the best seed times. Swimmers who matched their seed times exactly got a $10 Starbucks card on the spot. We had 8 winners. We posted lists on the web site about the seed time winners (exact match), honorable mentions (within 0.10 seconds), top 50 seeders, worst 50 seeders, and the full list of how every swimmer rated in their seeding ability. Our average "seed error" across almost 4500 swims was about 3.6 seconds per 100 yards, or about 4%. You can see our full analysis here (scroll down to the bottom): www.meetresults.com/.../results.shtml -Rick

My views are rather well documented on this issue. :-) You should seed yourself with your best estimation of the time you will swim at the meet. In most cases, something along the lines of your best time over the past year or so is probably a good estimate. Sandbagging, IMHO, is bad sportsmanship. The point of having a meet is just that - to meet. The purpose of a meet is to swim against other people and race. You may be happy to swim in heat 1, and lap everyone in the 100 free. But if you belonged in the last heat, there are swimmers who are swimming in that heat who are counting on YOU to be in the last heat also, to race against them. They paid their entry fees on the expectation that they would get the opportunity to race against people of similar speed. If you take yourself out of the proper seeding, then you are hurting their swim. If you want to swim by yourself and sandbag and blow people out of the water... go find a lane in a pool somewhere and do it where you're only dealing with yourself. At a meet, other people expect to race against you. Otherwise, they'd all just keep swimming at practice. Also, those people in heat 1 that you're blowing away -- they don't like that. You're subjecting them to embarrassment for your own self interest. Not cool. At the Masters champs that I run, we explicitly reserve the right to adjust your seed time if it is obviously incorrect. Last year, we started a contest at our championship meet to see who could have the best seed times. Swimmers who matched their seed times exactly got a $10 Starbucks card on the spot. We had 8 winners. We posted lists on the web site about the seed time winners (exact match), honorable mentions (within 0.10 seconds), top 50 seeders, worst 50 seeders, and the full list of how every swimmer rated in their seeding ability. Our average "seed error" across almost 4500 swims was about 3.6 seconds per 100 yards, or about 4%. You can see our full analysis here (scroll down to the bottom): www.meetresults.com/.../results.shtml -Rick