The New Approach to Meets

Life's not always fair and there are things outside of our control. The most important thing at this point is getting through this pandemic safely.Great post, Mark. I think one thing all of us Masters swimmers should remind ourselves is that our swimming careers last a lifetime. Yeah, I know many of us have goals and ambitions to do things at certain ages, but we're just going to have to be patient. I've set my expectations that, other than potentially some physically distanced open water races in the summer of 2021, I won't be doing any pool racing until 2022. If the vaccines come and accelerate that timeline, that's awesome. While this is an external factor affecting my ability to compete, over the last ~30 years as a Masters swimmer, I have certainly had a number of occasions where events and issues kept me from competing ... Having my first two kids close together - I barely trained, much less competed from '96 to '00 Joining a startup technology firm - after 4 years of always attending at least one nationals, '01 to '04, I completely missed '05 to '07 Blowing my shoulder out when I got too ambitious in 2012 (when I aged up to 45) caused me to miss all of 2013 Moving to another country in 2019 meant that I was really hoping 2020 was the year I'd be back at a USMS Nationals The point is, we're all going to have "life" throw us a curveball and slow down or prevent us from competing ... but we all have our whole lives ahead of us to come back and compete again. I'm 53 now and really hope I have at least another 42 years in the sport (because then maybe, just maybe, I could set a national record in the 95-100 age group :D) COVID-19 is a big, global curveball. But, we will compete again

Life's not always fair and there are things outside of our control. The most important thing at this point is getting through this pandemic safely.Great post, Mark. I think one thing all of us Masters swimmers should remind ourselves is that our swimming careers last a lifetime. Yeah, I know many of us have goals and ambitions to do things at certain ages, but we're just going to have to be patient. I've set my expectations that, other than potentially some physically distanced open water races in the summer of 2021, I won't be doing any pool racing until 2022. If the vaccines come and accelerate that timeline, that's awesome. While this is an external factor affecting my ability to compete, over the last ~30 years as a Masters swimmer, I have certainly had a number of occasions where events and issues kept me from competing ... Having my first two kids close together - I barely trained, much less competed from '96 to '00 Joining a startup technology firm - after 4 years of always attending at least one nationals, '01 to '04, I completely missed '05 to '07 Blowing my shoulder out when I got too ambitious in 2012 (when I aged up to 45) caused me to miss all of 2013 Moving to another country in 2019 meant that I was really hoping 2020 was the year I'd be back at a USMS Nationals The point is, we're all going to have "life" throw us a curveball and slow down or prevent us from competing ... but we all have our whole lives ahead of us to come back and compete again. I'm 53 now and really hope I have at least another 42 years in the sport (because then maybe, just maybe, I could set a national record in the 95-100 age group :D) COVID-19 is a big, global curveball. But, we will compete again