It's been cool for me over the last few years seeing and competing against a number of guys from both my age group and collegiate days. However, when I think back to my college team, in particular, I'm struck by how many guys are NOT back swimming and competing in Masters. I realize this is probably the wrong audience to ask (since we're back in the pool), but, since for me swimming & competing go hand in hand and I love swimming, I'm still puzzled why more people don't come back to the sport and to racing?
I let this thread out there and only got some time tonight to read through all of these thoughtful responses. I definitely can relate to burnout and experienced it myself. I've also had periods where I've trained without competing, trained & competed and periods of near complete swimming inactivity. I keep coming back to it, though, and keep re-discovering why I like the sport and how it makes me feel. As I read through the responses (like Muppet's below), I realized that the underlying question is really more along the lines of what can we do to market to our former teammates the joy of Masters swimming?
To address the thread topic, I think it would help if more people understood that most of our membership have a 40+hour/wk job and put our kids ahead of our own schedules and still somehow find time to squeeze in workouts and swim a meet or two now and then. That may help some of our missing comrades back into our sport.
I let this thread out there and only got some time tonight to read through all of these thoughtful responses. I definitely can relate to burnout and experienced it myself. I've also had periods where I've trained without competing, trained & competed and periods of near complete swimming inactivity. I keep coming back to it, though, and keep re-discovering why I like the sport and how it makes me feel. As I read through the responses (like Muppet's below), I realized that the underlying question is really more along the lines of what can we do to market to our former teammates the joy of Masters swimming?
To address the thread topic, I think it would help if more people understood that most of our membership have a 40+hour/wk job and put our kids ahead of our own schedules and still somehow find time to squeeze in workouts and swim a meet or two now and then. That may help some of our missing comrades back into our sport.
