Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

I urge you to quickly read Leslie The Fortress Livingston's excellent if somewhat convoluted and heavily codiciled analysis of her swimming times, vis a vis different racing suits (especially the HyNeck Pro and B70).

You can read her analysis here, http://forums.usms.org/blog.php?b=2131 but if you don't want to do this, in a nutshell, she concludes that the B70 helps a little, but not all that much, and primarily for distance swims, which she doesn't do any of (unless by distance she means the 100 IM, which in my mind stretches the meaning of the word "distance" to the very elastic limits, much as I believe Leslie has similarly stretched her "analysis" into a realm where only 15-dimensional Gaussian-style ubermath, also used in the hedge fund industry, can justify it.)

I wrote the following as a comment on Leslie's blog, but it ended up being so long, and it's also been a while since I posted a vlog of my own, so I am putting it here instead:

Leslie, here is my analysis of your analysis, but broken down in another way. I am going to go through each of these things and put your best time without a B70 and your best time with a B70, and leave all other variables aside.

Backstroke Events:

50 Back SCY:


29.34 (H-Pro, Nats)(T)

28.5 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: .84

100 Back SCY:


1:04.7 (H-Pro)(T)

1:02.8 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: 1.9

50 Back SCM:


33.2 (R-Pro)(T)
31.7 (B70)*

B70 Assist, 1.5 seconds

100 Back, SCM:


1:13.9 (R-Pro)(T)
1:11.7 (B70)*

B70 Assist with caveats noted above, 2.2 seconds

50 Back, LCM:


33.48 (R-Pro)(T)
33.40 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: .08 second

100 Back, LCM:


1:14.1 (R-Pro)(T)
1:13.4 (B70)

B70 Assist: .7 second

Fly Events:

50 fly, SCY:


27.6 (H-Pro)(T)

27.2 (B70)(T)


B70 assist: .4 second

100 fly SCY:


1:04.2 (H-Pro)(T)
1:01.3 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: 2.9

50 fly SCM:


31.48 (R-Pro)
29.99 (B70)(some T)

B70 Assist: 1.49 second

50 fly, LCM:


31.61 (R-Pro)(T)
31.13 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: .58

50 free, SCY:


25.99 (H-Pro)(T)
24.97 (B70)(T)

B70 Assist: 1.02

50 free, SCM:


28.7 (R-Pro)(T)
28.5 (B70)

B70 Assist: .2


50 free, LCM:


29.2 (R-Pro)(T)
29.3 (B70)

B70 Assist: -.1

100 IM, SCY:

1:06.8 (H-Pro)
1:04.1 (B70)*

B70 Assist: 2.7

You can slice and dice data in multiple ways, add all sorts of variables and explanations and fudge factors, but the bottom line as far as I can see is that with only one exception, the 50 LCM freestyle, you went significantly faster in every single race wearing a B70. All your second fastest times as a master (with the exception again of the 50 LCM free), you swam either in a B70 or in the fastest available pre-B70 generation racing suit, that is, the H-Pro.

In no event did you get your get your fastest or even second fastest time without wearing one of these suits. Since the H-Pro is already considered a very fast suit, the fact that there were such consistent and at times huge time drops (four time drops between 1-2 seconds; two time drops between 2-3 seconds, all in events of a total distance of 50-100) makes me more convinced than ever that the B70 represents a huge advantage over the very best previous generation suit.

Furthermore, if you average the time changes for the 50s [.84, 1.5, .08, .4, 1.49, .58, 1.02, .2, -.1] you have an average drop over 50 yards and meters of .67 seconds from your fastest B70 performances compared with your fastest H-Pro swims. You swam fewer 100s, but the average drop was even greater here--[1.9, 2.2, .7, 2.9, 2.7] for an average of 2.08 seconds.

Such time drops might not mean much for the average lap swimmer. But for a swimmer already near the very top of the national hierarchy in her age group, 2/3rds of a second in 50s and over 2 seconds in a 100 is huge. Again, this is not comparing a poly suit to the B70. It's comparing the talk of the Sydney Olympics suit with the talk of the post-Beijing Olympics suit (at least in masters swimming circles.

Sorry, Leslie. I wish I could have coroborated your analysis. But my analysis of your analysis, albeit one that uses Occam's Razor to cut away fudge factors I am sure you would love to keep, reaches a diametrically opposite conclusion!