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.
Excellent info, thanks.
I had looked for some description of what baseline (seed time) USA Swimming used, but didn't find the info you linked to.
Lacking that info, I had actually tried a few different options to see what combination of the top 16 times they were using. It turns out that averaging times 9-16 over the previous quad comes very, very close, but I knew I was missing something.
Using the best ever 16th place time makes sense -- it would make the list more stable and less susceptible to fluctuations from year to year. Especially in the less populated age groups. I guess I would use the best ever 10th place time, since USMS' Top 10 list is the equivalent of USA Swimming's Top 16 list. And it makes sense (to me) to view the Top 10 list as the next step above a AAAA ranking.
I agree that tech suits wreak havoc with the lists (under either method). Using the best ever Nth place time, the tech suit times would skew the motivational times semi-permanently (until the tech suit seed time gets beat). Using the rolling average, the effect is smaller, but takes 3 years to roll off the chart.
The next time I update the charts, I'll crunch some numbers to see if it makes sense to switch over to using an Nth best time as the baseline.
Excellent info, thanks.
I had looked for some description of what baseline (seed time) USA Swimming used, but didn't find the info you linked to.
Lacking that info, I had actually tried a few different options to see what combination of the top 16 times they were using. It turns out that averaging times 9-16 over the previous quad comes very, very close, but I knew I was missing something.
Using the best ever 16th place time makes sense -- it would make the list more stable and less susceptible to fluctuations from year to year. Especially in the less populated age groups. I guess I would use the best ever 10th place time, since USMS' Top 10 list is the equivalent of USA Swimming's Top 16 list. And it makes sense (to me) to view the Top 10 list as the next step above a AAAA ranking.
I agree that tech suits wreak havoc with the lists (under either method). Using the best ever Nth place time, the tech suit times would skew the motivational times semi-permanently (until the tech suit seed time gets beat). Using the rolling average, the effect is smaller, but takes 3 years to roll off the chart.
The next time I update the charts, I'll crunch some numbers to see if it makes sense to switch over to using an Nth best time as the baseline.
