Best Times?

Anybody hit any best times in practice coming back from quarantine?:joker: You're funny! But, in seriousness, no and hell no. I was fully out of the water from mid-March through about Memorial Day, and then started getting in lake swims in June. By July, I did the same volume of monthly yardage/meterage as I used to do (e.g., ~55,000 meters / ~60K yards), but lake swimming is very different than pool swimming and, at least for me, I can never match the intensity in the lake with what I can do in the pool. Our pools where I live just opened up in the past couple of weeks and this Monday I did a 'base pace' test set that I've used throughout my masters career (3 x 300 best average). Here are my stats: 3.2% slower than I was in February, a time when I felt like I was in pretty good, but not yet peak shape 8.4% slower than my best performance on this in the last 5 years (December 2016) Now, I'm 53, so I realize that with each passing year, there's likely to be some degradation so I might not ever hit those times from 2016 again, but I should be able to be about 5% faster than where I am today. Based upon prior experience with breaks or gaps in training, I imagine it will take me another 2-3 months to get back to that level. My general rule is that it takes me at least twice as long to 'return to form' as the gap in training was. I'm reading all these SwimSwam articles about already fast kids and pros hitting lifetime best times after a month or a few weeks back in the water. Kids and pros are different beasts. For the kids, especially the young boys/men, they're growing and growing muscle even when they're not training. For the pros, I imagine that most of them kept up a very rigorous training regimen (moreso than most of us mere mortals) that kept them close to top physical form even when they couldn't be in the water.

Anybody hit any best times in practice coming back from quarantine?:joker: You're funny! But, in seriousness, no and hell no. I was fully out of the water from mid-March through about Memorial Day, and then started getting in lake swims in June. By July, I did the same volume of monthly yardage/meterage as I used to do (e.g., ~55,000 meters / ~60K yards), but lake swimming is very different than pool swimming and, at least for me, I can never match the intensity in the lake with what I can do in the pool. Our pools where I live just opened up in the past couple of weeks and this Monday I did a 'base pace' test set that I've used throughout my masters career (3 x 300 best average). Here are my stats: 3.2% slower than I was in February, a time when I felt like I was in pretty good, but not yet peak shape 8.4% slower than my best performance on this in the last 5 years (December 2016) Now, I'm 53, so I realize that with each passing year, there's likely to be some degradation so I might not ever hit those times from 2016 again, but I should be able to be about 5% faster than where I am today. Based upon prior experience with breaks or gaps in training, I imagine it will take me another 2-3 months to get back to that level. My general rule is that it takes me at least twice as long to 'return to form' as the gap in training was. I'm reading all these SwimSwam articles about already fast kids and pros hitting lifetime best times after a month or a few weeks back in the water. Kids and pros are different beasts. For the kids, especially the young boys/men, they're growing and growing muscle even when they're not training. For the pros, I imagine that most of them kept up a very rigorous training regimen (moreso than most of us mere mortals) that kept them close to top physical form even when they couldn't be in the water.