Ques on seed times

Now there are people, who will choose to swim back to back events and will, even tho they are very fast swimmers, put an NT entry time for the first event to try and gain as much recovery time as possible. Some of them even try to justify this by indicating that the meet director OKed this questionable behavoir. I'd do it again in a heartbeat too. Although my latest ploy is either not to sign up for back-to-back events (and byatch about it because they're almost always fly/back) or scratch. Since I get constantly ragged on and since the fly-back events have been back to back in virtually every meet I can remember swimming in the last year (and are for my next one), I have ceased to feel any guilt over my seed times should I enter them. And, uh, who won all the rubber duckies this weekend in his heats? Not me! However, I typically aim for Option C.

Oh I think about this alot in event planning!!! Depends on what event, what meet, what your goal is, and relative event position. Like Paul says, if it's back to back events, or I am going for a split time, I will likely enter profoundly slow times so I am taken out of the seeding processs. But just in case my NT is not accepted, i'll enter a real time (like a 2:00 100 free or 5:00 200 free). At Nationals, I enter with my very fastest actual reasonable relatively recent masters time. Signal you intend to swim fast. I can swim slow and to the side lanes every day in practice, i'm not paying over $1,000 to go to nationals and then try to avoid racing or being raced. At selected local/zone/regional meets where it is mixed men and women heats, it seems customary to slightly but appropriately low ball times. You don't want to enter your time too slow (sandbag and not good racing, what's the point?), and you don't want to enter too fast (get your butt kicked by all the people who slightly and uniformly sandbagged and now are causing huge wake). There's a delicate balance there. I never enter with a time faster than I have actually swum.

My advice would be to swim your event all out in practice before registering for a meet to at least get a ball park idea of what seed time to use. TO coincide with option C as presented in the first post, even if it has been a few years, this is the best option for you, the hosts and your fellow competitors. Using your practice time is much better ettiquite. Even if you have a huge differential in your race, you were plenty responsible enough to get things into the right places.

But as a general rule I think you should enter your best time of the last year for seeding, as long as you have one. I think it depends. I can usually predict my times to within a second or two, so I enter what I think I will swim. For an in-season, non-taper meet I know I'm not going to swim close to my best times, so there's really no point in entering with those times. If you're the kind of swimmer who can swim close to personal bests at any time of the season then perhaps that strategy makes sense.

I go with C for in-season meets... As Kirk noted, there's no point in me entering my shaved times from the year before because I won't be close. NOW, for people still on the rapid-improvement curve (usually people in their first couple years of competing or youngsters under 24) this is a pretty decent method... For shave and taper meets, I usually enter my times from the previous year's "big" meet. Sometimes this completely backfires, as it did at SCY Nats this year when I entered the meet not yet knowing I was pregnant and swam some pretty slowwww times 11 weeks pregnant and quite nauseous.

And, uh, who won all the rubber duckies this weekend in his heats? Not me! Um, check the times. Those were from SCY Nats. And I only beat them by about .5 seconds each. :thhbbb: :thhbbb: :thhbbb:

Bonus points for pulling the anti-fort: enter an event with a ridiculously fast time (e.g. 39 seconds for the 100 free) and then enter the next event with NT, so that you swim two heats back to back. Double bonus points if you flex conspicuously when you get back on the blocks for the second event. Triple donut bacon bonus points if someone calls you a sandbagger following the second event.

Don't sweat it too much. This kind of thing happens at just about every meet.

You may feel sort of silly. You'll be in the slowest heat, along with some true beginners and/or some people 4x your age. In the 100, you could lap someone. Given what you have posted about your practice times, I would recommend that you see whether or not the meet director can change your NTs to some seed times based on those practice times. If they can seed you properly, you and the people in that slowest heat will all have more fun and swim better. Well, I've only been swimming for 5 weeks, and when I registered, it was only 3 weeks, so I hadn't even swum a full 50 ***. It was just the stroke I was most comfortable with, and I really wanted to go to the meet. But, that's a good idea. I think I will try and get in contact with the meet director.

I'm doing my first regular meet in a really long time this weekend and when I registered I pretty much pulled some numbers out of my ass that sounded at least moderately right. I don't think I've ever entered anything without a time. I haven't swam in a meet since like '98 and I don't train in meters so I have no idea where I'm really going to come out. But as a general rule I think you should enter your best time of the last year for seeding, as long as you have one. There's 2 more meets that I want to sign up for but I'm waiting for this weekend so I can base my entry on some real swims from this century.