When I started swimming masters a few years ago, I soon found myself wanting some time standards to compare myself against. Sure, tracking my own PRs is motivating, but I also wanted some sort of objective mark to measure myself against.
There is the Top 10 list, of course, but I'm not close enough to those times for them to serve as realistic motivation. Nationals qualifying times provide a slightly lower bar, but these are still out of many masters' reach. It seems like there should be some sort of time standards that are more widely applicable -- like the A, AA, ... motivational times in kids' age group swimming.
I did use those USA Swimming motivational times for a while, but I got tired of comparing myself to 12-year-olds. Eventually I decided to create my own masters' motivational time standards, using the same method that is used for the kids.
I have really enjoyed using these motivational times over the past couple of years, and I'm guessing they might be useful to others as well. Especially for those, like me, who are competitive enough to be motivated by a quantitative benchmark, but not fast enough to aspire to the Top 10 list.
I have just updated the SCY list, and figured I would post it here for others to use.
Please enjoy. I'd also love to hear any feedback.
Chris - can you explain your rating calculator like you would to a second grader please? Say, for instance you have an 85% rating on an event, what does that mean to those of us with liberal arts educations?
The rating is the "ideal record" of an event at your age, divided by your time in it, then multiplied by 100. So the significance of a rating of 85 is that a record-caliber time is about 85% of what your time was.
So the next question is, what is the "ideal" record? Ultimately it is a number (derived from WRs and ARs) that is supposed to describe the effect of age on performance in a given event.
If you plot each record time (in sec) against the median age of the age group of the record, you get data that trend upward. I then "fit" a function to those data to describe the trend. The fitted function, which averages out the effects of "soft" and "insanely fast" records, describe the "ideal" record for a given age. Here is a link to an example; the line describes how the "ideal record" depends on age.
If you make the assumption that the records are, generally, equally hard across all events and across genders, then the rating allows you to compare performances in different events, courses, ages and genders. It can even allow you to do time conversions between courses with an age-related component to it (I have done this for myself; the conversions are pretty consistent with other converters I've seen out there).
So you can start trash-talking anyone you want, not just men in your own age group. Which ultimately is the point.
(Actually, mostly the point is for personal goal setting. As age sets in and we get slower, we can possibly take some comfort if our ratings remain the same or improve; it means we are beating the aging curve of record-holders.)
The ratings on the VA site use the 2007 (pre-LZR) records. At some point soon I would like to offer two versions: one using the most recent pre-LZR records, and one using the current records. So if we lose the suits -- or someone elects to swim without them, if they remain legal -- you can make comparison between the two types of swims.
Chris - can you explain your rating calculator like you would to a second grader please? Say, for instance you have an 85% rating on an event, what does that mean to those of us with liberal arts educations?
The rating is the "ideal record" of an event at your age, divided by your time in it, then multiplied by 100. So the significance of a rating of 85 is that a record-caliber time is about 85% of what your time was.
So the next question is, what is the "ideal" record? Ultimately it is a number (derived from WRs and ARs) that is supposed to describe the effect of age on performance in a given event.
If you plot each record time (in sec) against the median age of the age group of the record, you get data that trend upward. I then "fit" a function to those data to describe the trend. The fitted function, which averages out the effects of "soft" and "insanely fast" records, describe the "ideal" record for a given age. Here is a link to an example; the line describes how the "ideal record" depends on age.
If you make the assumption that the records are, generally, equally hard across all events and across genders, then the rating allows you to compare performances in different events, courses, ages and genders. It can even allow you to do time conversions between courses with an age-related component to it (I have done this for myself; the conversions are pretty consistent with other converters I've seen out there).
So you can start trash-talking anyone you want, not just men in your own age group. Which ultimately is the point.
(Actually, mostly the point is for personal goal setting. As age sets in and we get slower, we can possibly take some comfort if our ratings remain the same or improve; it means we are beating the aging curve of record-holders.)
The ratings on the VA site use the 2007 (pre-LZR) records. At some point soon I would like to offer two versions: one using the most recent pre-LZR records, and one using the current records. So if we lose the suits -- or someone elects to swim without them, if they remain legal -- you can make comparison between the two types of swims.
