I am new to this forum. I would like to know what people think is an acceptable time for swimming a mile of crawl in a pool. I am a 62 year old woman who is just recently getting back to swimming. My goal is to swim three days during the week. My best time so far was 35.30 mins. I don't belong to a team. I would appreciate any helpful feedback.
One thing we used to do at our practices on occasion was a broken 1650 (the short course "mile" swim). You swim it broken by the following lengths with the same amount of rest between each segment: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. All told you swim 66 lengths of the pool. This makes it easy to compute your effective time. Suppose you give yourself 10 seconds rest after each segment and swim the entire set in 30 minutes. There are 10 rests of 10 seconds each, or 1min40sec (100 seconds). Subtract that from your total time and you get a time for the 1650 of 28:20.
Depending on your current conditioning is, you might need more or less rest between each chunk of the set. The goal is to reduce the rest interval over time as you get in better shape.
As for what is an acceptable time, that depends on a bunch of factors. Are you a former high-level swimmer interested in competing at a high level again? Check out the top ten times on the USMS website. If you have more modest goals you might see what the spread of times for your region's championships were last year. Given your age group and location I'm going to guess the spread of times will have been all over the range, from times that fit into the above chart to people swimming the 1650 in twice those times.
HTH,
Skip
Former Member
This web site contains a tabulation of times of everyone who swam the 1650 in a swim meet last year.
From the main page, www.usms.org,
Click on the "Competition" tab at the top of the page
Click on "Event Rankings"
Under the "SCY" heading, choose:
Season: 2007-2008
Gender: Women
Stroke: Free
Distance: 1650
Ages: 60 through: 64
Display Top: 50
You will see that in your age group last year, 29 women swam the 1650 Free. Their times ranged from 22:21.40 to 44:06.52.
Former Member
Thanks very much for your help. I appreciate it.
Frances
