Masters Motivational Times

Jim Jim Jim, don't worry so much. Alzheimer's will take care of your comparison worries. Each new time will become a personal best time as far as you can remember. There is greatness in your future! Who are you, young whippersnapper? And where is my pill?

Thanks for the reference, Chris. One question: is it correct to assume these predictions were based on improvements from earlier generation body suits--like the Fastskin Pro, FSII, etc.? If so, then finding that the 100 LCM freestyle times improved by .7 seconds more than anticipated does not really tell the story of how these guys would have swum in jammers, right? It only says the top 8 improved, on average, by .7 seconds more than historical time drop norms would have predicted, with these historical norms based, at least in recent years, on swims done in all the textile body suits in wide use since the Aquablade made its debut in 1996. According to Speedo, this same year, at the Atlanta Olympics, 76% of all swimming medals were won in SPEEDO, most wearing SPEEDO Aquablade." Yes that is true. However I find it interesting that this year (2008) was the only year in which the times were faster than predicted. All those past advances did not result in such a mismatch. This doesn't necessarily mean older technology wasn't at all effective. It might mean is that the advancement in suit technology was fairly steady -- and incorporated in the model -- until the latest jump (ie, invention of the LZR, B70, etc). PS my friend and swimming coach Bill White, who is 39, and I both swam the 400 SCY IM at a local Y meet a few weeks back. I just used your grading formula and found--to my delight--that Bill's 4:34.12 at age 39 scored exactly the same as my 5:06.45 at age 57. We both scored 89.3. I don't think this is necessarily very motivating for Bill, but it certainly is for me! For a modest fee, I can jigger the calculation to provide you with any desired outcome.

That's where you lose me .... In what sense: that you don't agree with the assumption, or that you don't understand the statement? The assumption being incorrect basically affects the ability to use the rating as a basis to compare performances in different events or between genders. For example, I can pick two very impressive swims from the NEM swim meet. Mike Ross, age 41, 50 back: 25.53, rated at 104.6 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen, age 47, 200 fly: 2:23.18, rated at 104.2 Consider how difficult a comparison this is: different genders, different ages, different events. The rating system gives a slight nod to Mike's swim. But that assumes that the records for women's 200 SCM fly are -- as a whole -- equally as tough as the men's 50 SCM back records. If we wish to use the rating in this manner, you are basically forced to make that assumption. So the accuracy of the statement, "Mike's swim is a little more impressive than Karlyn's" is only as good as that assumption is true. If you also compare across courses (eg, to Mike's 100 SCY back from last year was 48.49, rated at 106.9), you have to make a further assumption that SCM records are equally as hard as SCY records. This is a dubious assumption in my mind, though I think the SCM records have gotten much tougher over the last 5-10 years. But if you want to make comparisons across courses, you really are stuck with making an assumption of this type. Finally, all of those ratings use 2007 (pre-LZR) records to evaluate swims done in LZR-era suits, which tends to inflate those ratings and make it difficult to compare to older swims. But if you use the ratings in a more limited sense, such as personal goal-setting, fewer assumptions need to be made. If my rating in a given event improves over the years, it means that I am withstanding the rigors of aging better than the record-holders in that event. That's not a bad thing...

I think if I had known about that rating calculator earlier, that would have satisfied my need for an objective benchmark, and I wouldn't have bothered with these time standard charts. I'm glad you did; not everyone is comfortable with (or wants to go thru the hassle of) using a computer to calculate their ratings. Although the people who frequent the forums are not necessarily a representative slice of the USMS membership, I have been moderately surprised at the positive response to your table. I might have predicted the opposite, since some people might not want to be reminded of their age-group days or don't want to think of masters being as "serious" as age-group swimming.

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?

stillwater or dolphin2. Tech suits bad Dope the children I've found my new niche.

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.

I do think that the next major need for motivation, at least for me, will be coming to grips with what I suspect will be a relatively huge uptick in times in the coming post-speed-suit era. Jim Jim Jim, don't worry so much. Alzheimer's will take care of your comparison worries. Each new time will become a personal best time as far as you can remember. There is greatness in your future!

Also noticed that I fair better in scm than in scy, which I suspected, although I'm not sure why that is. That should be true for most people. SCY is a lot more popular than SCM. If some of the fast people don't race SCM, that slows down the Top 10 times, and your swims look better in comparison.

Looks like the AA times are basically the national qualifying times. That's no accident. Both are based on Top 10 + 15%. For 200s and longer, the NQTs are +10%, which corresponds to AAA times. The motivational times should be a hair faster than NQTs, because they're based on the 6th-10th times, while NQTs are based on the 10th place time.