To this day, making this practice remains by far my proudest moment as a practice swimmer!
You will also notice that before age 49, I never broke 20 minutes. I was not swimming particularly hard at this point in my masters career, the body suits had not come out, and these times were all done at practice, not a meet.
Two other conspicuous 20 min+ outliers include the 20:41 done at age 52, which can be explained by broken ribs; and the 20:03 at age 58 (last year), which was the first year the body suits were banned, plus I had suffered a detached retina that January, which put me out of the water for nearly three weeks.
I have always thought I look good with that flouncy pony tail out the ball cap look! Now I can prove
it!
Analysis of Recent "Comparables"
For an apples-to-apples comparison, let us look at my recent swim at 59
(19:38.20) and my swim at 57 two years earlier
(19:34.18).
On the surface, it appears that I have slowed down by 4.02 seconds over the past two years. My pace per 100 has deteriorated from 1:11.41 to 1:11.16, or a quarter of a second per hundred in two years.
On an annual basis, it would seem that I am slowing down by approximately one eighth of a second per hundred.
There are, however, several fudge factors that make this "apples-to-apples" comparison more of a "Granny Smith vs. Red Delicious" situation.
First, suit differences.
At 57, I swam the 1650 in my "floatie" body suit, the B70. At 59, I swam shaved an in a LSR elite jammer given to me a couple years ago. Did the suit change make a huge difference in my times?
It definitely did in
some events. At 57, for instance, I swam my lifetime best 200 SCY freestyle in the B70, breaking in the 1:54's for the first and only time in my life. Since then, my fastest 200s have been high 1:57s. My 50s and 100s have also shown clear deterioration thanks to the suit change.
But for some reason, distance events of 500 and over don't seem to have shown as much of change. It seems like they should--with the B70 on, I took 1-2 less strokes per length swimming exactly the same way as always; moreover, I regularly gained at least a couple feet further on pushoffs and dives.
You would think such things would prove especially additive over longer distances, but so far that hasn't been the case. Perhaps the inability of body heat to escape the body suit as easily might muddle its impact on my own distance performances.
Conclusion: replacement of the B70 with a jammer probably hurt my time, but I cannot absolutely prove this.
In this corner, Red
vs.
In this corner, Granny
Even apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to make sense of in the post-Body Suit Era!
Second, accumulated yardage leading
up to the 1650.
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