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.
Here the Free / Fly and *** are about the same - but Back is way off. Maybe we disagree because I am a Freestyler and you are a Backstroker :bump:
Do you think that one of the factors here with backstroke could be that this stroke has changed more in recent years than the others? I am speaking specifically of turns and SDKS. Anyone in their 40s almost certainly did not learn these in the early part of their backstroke careers, back in the days when nobody SDK'd off the walls, and you had to touch each wall with your hand on every turn.
Maybe the reason the 200 backstroke masters records are so much further off the world records than other strokes is because most masters past a certain age had to learn these new techniques in later life. They might be very, very good at them--Chris and Mike Ross have superb SDKs. But perhaps the world record is held by somebody who learned these things when he was 4 or 5.
If this has any validity, then one might predict that breaststroke, too, would show some greater divergence in masters records since the wave stroke was also pioneered relatively recently. Watching guys swim this at Nationals, and you still see the flat style predominating in older age groups.
Here the Free / Fly and *** are about the same - but Back is way off. Maybe we disagree because I am a Freestyler and you are a Backstroker :bump:
Do you think that one of the factors here with backstroke could be that this stroke has changed more in recent years than the others? I am speaking specifically of turns and SDKS. Anyone in their 40s almost certainly did not learn these in the early part of their backstroke careers, back in the days when nobody SDK'd off the walls, and you had to touch each wall with your hand on every turn.
Maybe the reason the 200 backstroke masters records are so much further off the world records than other strokes is because most masters past a certain age had to learn these new techniques in later life. They might be very, very good at them--Chris and Mike Ross have superb SDKs. But perhaps the world record is held by somebody who learned these things when he was 4 or 5.
If this has any validity, then one might predict that breaststroke, too, would show some greater divergence in masters records since the wave stroke was also pioneered relatively recently. Watching guys swim this at Nationals, and you still see the flat style predominating in older age groups.
