2010 SCM Zone Championships

Many of us meticulously blog about our training, consequently our relative levels of fitness from one year to the next can be easily assessed on the basis of our performances on a day to day basis in practice. Case in point: last year (in a Blue Seventy) I went 4:47.14 in the 400 free; this year (shaved) I went 4:53.22, a six second difference (1.5 seconds/100). My training volume is the same, and my practice times are as fast, if not faster, than they were last year. Thus it is entirely reasonable to attribute the time difference to the suit rather than to age. There is some truth to this, and the effects of 1 year of aging shouldn't be great. The suits are purported to have a roughly 2% improvement on times -- maybe more -- and 1 year of "graceful aging" (aka degradation) doesn't reach that level until about age 80, at least according to the numbers given earlier. (I also believe the effects of age may be somewhat event-specific.) But practices are not meets; races are not repeats. There is no guarantee that keeping practice times consistent will result in the same times in meets. As a matter of fact, compared to my college days, my performances in practices are much, much closer to my meet performances than they used to be. Some of this is being wiser and emphasizing race-pace training more than I used to, but when I was younger I seemed to have a fifth gear in races that I no longer have. When I swim with age-groupers, I notice the same phenomenon: there are people I can be competitive with in practice who just blow me away in meets. One reason that the suits were so popular, maybe the MAIN reason, is that they allowed us to pretend aging wasn't happening. While I am certainly a BIG believer that exercise, especially HIT (high-intensity training), are a great mitigator to the aging process, I think it is foolish to pretend it has absolutely no effect. There is a reason that records get slower with age. Anyway, I'll also point out that the increase you report (0.75 sec/50 for the 400) is right in the middle of the range between Jim's estimate of 1 sec/50 and my age-adjusted estimate of 0.5 sec/50 for Rich. Of course it also isn't clear if the suit's effects scale linearly with distance. Are those enough caveats and conditional statements for you? Typical scientist-speak: always leave yourself plausible deniability. :bolt: I'll also once again point to my own, personal, comparison of with-suits and without-suits. I think I was in better shape in 2009 than in 2008, though.

Many of us meticulously blog about our training, consequently our relative levels of fitness from one year to the next can be easily assessed on the basis of our performances on a day to day basis in practice. Case in point: last year (in a Blue Seventy) I went 4:47.14 in the 400 free; this year (shaved) I went 4:53.22, a six second difference (1.5 seconds/100). My training volume is the same, and my practice times are as fast, if not faster, than they were last year. Thus it is entirely reasonable to attribute the time difference to the suit rather than to age. There is some truth to this, and the effects of 1 year of aging shouldn't be great. The suits are purported to have a roughly 2% improvement on times -- maybe more -- and 1 year of "graceful aging" (aka degradation) doesn't reach that level until about age 80, at least according to the numbers given earlier. (I also believe the effects of age may be somewhat event-specific.) But practices are not meets; races are not repeats. There is no guarantee that keeping practice times consistent will result in the same times in meets. As a matter of fact, compared to my college days, my performances in practices are much, much closer to my meet performances than they used to be. Some of this is being wiser and emphasizing race-pace training more than I used to, but when I was younger I seemed to have a fifth gear in races that I no longer have. When I swim with age-groupers, I notice the same phenomenon: there are people I can be competitive with in practice who just blow me away in meets. One reason that the suits were so popular, maybe the MAIN reason, is that they allowed us to pretend aging wasn't happening. While I am certainly a BIG believer that exercise, especially HIT (high-intensity training), are a great mitigator to the aging process, I think it is foolish to pretend it has absolutely no effect. There is a reason that records get slower with age. Anyway, I'll also point out that the increase you report (0.75 sec/50 for the 400) is right in the middle of the range between Jim's estimate of 1 sec/50 and my age-adjusted estimate of 0.5 sec/50 for Rich. Of course it also isn't clear if the suit's effects scale linearly with distance. Are those enough caveats and conditional statements for you? Typical scientist-speak: always leave yourself plausible deniability. :bolt: I'll also once again point to my own, personal, comparison of with-suits and without-suits. I think I was in better shape in 2009 than in 2008, though.