It's been about three years since I've done a swim meet. I'm planning to swim the IL state meet next month, probably swimming 100, 200, 500 free and 100 ***. I'm not too worried about estimating the shorter races, but I've never swum the 500, so I'm looking for some seed time estimating advice. Today I swam a couple broken 500s (200, 150, 100, 50, with a 10-second rest between segments). I swam one in 7:13 and pulled another in 7:00, both from a push. I figured a broken 500 would be a better estimate of actual race pace. Does a 7:13 seem like a reasonable estimate? Should I be more aggressive? Less?
Thx,
Skip
Former Member
Do you generally swim faster than you train? I swam a broken 1000 in practice and never went faster than 13 minutes, but in a meet I swam it in 12:33. I have always swum race events a lot faster than in training so I generally drop a little time off my best practice time.
If nothing else I would use your fastest time you achieved in practice. 10 seconds rest isn't a whole lot and I would think with the excitement of competition you could match that easily. Maybe enter at a 6:59.99?
Good luck at the meet!
Thanks for the responses. I guess I'll just go with 7:00 and hope for the best. My main aim was to seed myself into a heat where the other people swimming are about the same speed as me. As qbrain indicated though others might be guessing. There's always the possibility of encountering sandbaggers too I suppose.
Skip
You are making up a time to enter right? How many people do you think you are going to be swimming with that are doing the exact same thing?
I don't think your seed time is going to really matter too much, the odds are you are going to have at least a couple people in your heat that guessed their seed times, and are going to be fairly incorrect. If you are stuck next to them, your well planned seed time didn't help you at all. On top of that, there will be a huge range of abilities, so you might have someone who is 2 minutes faster than you and another that is two minutes slower than you in the same heat with you.
In conclusion, it doesn't matter. Focus on swimming your own race, and good luck.
I have noticed a lot of people on the forums have friends/enemies that they race all the time. If you find someone who is about your speed, it might make sense that you two keep in touch so you are entering with similar seed times so you know you will have someone to actually race.
I estimated a 7:00 500 free (never having swam it in my life) and ended up going a 6:35. I think that if you know that you can hold a certain pace (such as 1:20's or 1:15's per 100), you should be fine with entering that time. Your adrenaline will help you go much faster anyway. It should also keep you out of the heat with the much slower and NT people. GOOD LUCK!
