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.
Hey Swimosaur,
I thought about doing this as well but it kind of feels like a time sink to me. I work better with databases anyway and html scraping isn't something I do a lot. Best I can tell, he uses the USAS methodology for computing times:
motivational time = Seed time * Time standard adjustment
USAS uses the 16th fastest swim for each age group/event. The Masters were done using the average time for all 6th place to 10th place times for the previous 3 years. Seems complicated to me... why not just use the seed time as the 10th fastest swim for a given year? The time standard adjustments would be as follows:
AAAA = 1.05
AAA = 1.10
AA = 1.15
A = 1.20
BB = 1.30
B = 1.40
If you put in the work, it becomes the Swimosaur motivational times so you can change it up however you want.
Hey Swimosaur,
I thought about doing this as well but it kind of feels like a time sink to me. I work better with databases anyway and html scraping isn't something I do a lot. Best I can tell, he uses the USAS methodology for computing times:
motivational time = Seed time * Time standard adjustment
USAS uses the 16th fastest swim for each age group/event. The Masters were done using the average time for all 6th place to 10th place times for the previous 3 years. Seems complicated to me... why not just use the seed time as the 10th fastest swim for a given year? The time standard adjustments would be as follows:
AAAA = 1.05
AAA = 1.10
AA = 1.15
A = 1.20
BB = 1.30
B = 1.40
If you put in the work, it becomes the Swimosaur motivational times so you can change it up however you want.
