A Masters World Record Destroyed

It is not often that there is a chance to see truly world class swimming – swimming where a masters world record is absolutely shattered.

That is what masters swimmers witnessed at an evening club meet on 3 March at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre.

The Powerpoints Masters Swimming Club held their “Summer Smash 2023” meet where a powerful relay team from their club attacked the 4 x 200m mixed, freestyle world record.

At the halfway mark, the “red line” would have been nearly 60m behind the Powerpoints team.  For more, here is the mywaterworld.life write-up of the attack on that World Aquatics record. 

The Australian section of our news will be updated with this story later today.

mywaterworld.life will also bring you some vision of the 200m world record broken by Kaylee McKeown in the Women’s 200m Backstroke in a time of 2:03.14 – this record was set at the NSW Open Swimming Championships conducted at the Sydney Olympic Park Pool on Friday, 10 March 2023

Roundup of the 2023 Masters Swimming Tasmanina Championships

Finally, mywaterworld.life has caught up and posted its news item on the results of the Masters Swimming Tasmania 2023 Summer Championships.

National, Victorian and Tasmanina records broken, and the swim of the meet by Victorian visitor from the powerful Powerpoints Masters Swimming Club Jennie Bucknell, were the highlights of the meet.

Congratulations go to Jennie Bucknell and Rod Laurie for their new Australian records and to Amanda Duggan and Maciej Slugocki for their Swimmer of the Meet awards. The Tasmanina club with the highest standard of racing was the Hobart Aquatic Centre Masters Swimming Club.

Here is our news story.

mywaterworld.life is the home of the most comprehensive news of Masters swimming racing in Tasmania looking at the standard of the swimming using the World-Aquatics points as its benchmarks.

Tony Goodwin – Top Australian masters swimming national record breaker for 2022.

Masters swimming in Australia came roaring back in 2022 to its pre – pandemic levels – 233 national records in World Aquatics (WA) events broken during the year an an additional 91 in non-WA events.

Australia’s top record breaker for 2022 was Tony Goodwin who set 15 new national records in WA events and a further 5 in non-WA events – 20 in total for the year.

Our new story includes break-downs of the national record breakers by state, gender, club and distinguishes between WA and non-WA events.  A download of all the national record breakers by state is available from within the news item.

Previous national news stories

News of Masters Swimming in Tasmania continues.

mywatereworld.life has published two more news items looking back and summarising performances from 2022

Our strory on 29 January looked at the top World Aquatics point swims for 2022 and from 4 February we look at the Tasmanian record breakers for that year.

Those stories, and the ones from earlier this year, are on our News from Tasmania page.

Great swims of 2022 by Amanda Duggan and Maciej Slugocki

The latest news from mywaterworld.life takes a look at the best swimming performances of 2022 by masters swimmers in Tasmania.

The dominant swimmers of 2022, based on World Aquatics Points (not sure what “FINA” points are now called) were Amanda Duggan and Maciej Slugocki. Their 800 and 1500 metre freestyle times would have placed them both well within world top ten rankings in 2021 and Maciej’s 800m freestyle time would have scored him a number two in the world that year. The 2022 world ranking will be out in March.

You can read all about those swims and more in the mywaterworld.life news of 29 January. The story is also on the Masters inTasmania – Latest News page where you can find previous news items.

Happening in Tasmania

The 2003 pool season has now well and truly started for Tasmanian masters swimmers. Two swimming meets, jointly sanctioned with Swimming Tasmania have now been completed – one in Hobart on 14 January and the other in Launceston on 21 January.

Three Tasmanian records have already been broken, two by Brent Walker from the Hobart Aquatic Centre Masters SC and the other by Maciej Slugocki from the Tomatoes.

Here is the latest news from 21 January.

You can find the mywaterworld.life compilation of all news items from 2023 here.

Daily Training Programs

mywaterworl.life is expanding its offering – this time by making a daily training program available on line.

You don’t need to be a subscriber to this site but we would like you to be. That way you can guarantee that you recieve a notification each time we post something new.

This is a sample program , the first one mywaterworld.life has published on its NEW training programs page.

The programs are part of an integrated season training plan which mywaterworld.life can tailor to your racing season.

The 2023 focus of the training plan is the 2022* FINA World Masters Swimming Championships, starting on the Japanese island of Kyushu on 2 August 2023.

* And if you are curious why the chahmpionshisp being held in 2023 are called the 2022 championships it is beacuse that is what FINA, soon to be called World Aquatics, calls them.

Reaction Times and More on Pacing

How important and significant are reaction times?

Today we take a dive into the outcome of the Mens 4 x 50m freestyle relay at the World Aquatics Short Course Championships.

The margin between the 1st and 2nd placings was only 0.04 seconds – tighter margins are feasible, but not by much. Australia won this relay, not because it swam faster in the water, it didn’t, but because team members had better reaction times, by 0.09 seconds in total, than those of the Italians – and that was enough for the win.

Check out our story on the importance of reaction times and pacing in 400s.

Starts, Turns and Pacing

World Aquatics Championships provide a great opportunity to have a look at the difference in skills, and therefore the effectivness of the execution of race plans.

mywaterworld.life has put together this quick analysis of the Women’s 400 and Men’s 1500m freestyle events and the 4 x 100 freestyle relays.

In none of the events were the diffences in reaction times and skills off the turns significant enough to affect the results in any meaningful ways.

The events featured are all longer events, or relays, but when you get down to the shorter ones (50s and 100s) , and especially as this is short coure racing, hundreths of a second make the diffrence between a podium finish and not even making a final. This equally applies in relays as there are multipel changeovers and corresponding reaction time. It is so important to make evey push-off and turn in training a skill development pririoty. And as for the starts and turns, try some box jumps and burpees.

Pacing for the distance events is critical so have a look at the tables and see how consistent the pacing needs to be – train that pacing.

LEN Masters Swimming Championships – Day 1

The LEN Masters Swimming Championships are now in full swing with racing on day 1 completed – the 800m freestyle for both women and men.

So how did they go?  Two LEN Records – one female and one male, a high standard of racing and great times across the genders and most age groups.

And now, turning to the winning times. The table below sets out the winning time in each age group. Times in Bold are the new LEN records.

An impossible task, to report on the results from 26 age categories, so here are the links to the downloadable results for each gender.

Results day 1 – including splits

FINA Point* comparisons

FINA points for age group winning times are a great comparative indicator of the standard of each age group competition at the championships. The benchmark for each age group and gender is the FINA world record for the event as at 31 December of 2021.

The table that follows sets out the FINA points achieved by the winning time in each age group.

The average FINA points for the winners in the age categories were 852 for the men and 784 for women. The FINA points for the LEN Record breakers are displayed in bold.

To get a better understanding of the quality of the results, a comparison to the 2022 Australian championships results may help.  At those championships, conducted at the site of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the average FINA points of the winners, with the events conducted in short-course mode, were 673 compared to 852 LEN for men, and 624, compared to 784 LEN for the women.   As one would expect, the standard at the LEN Championships was significantly higher and the points confirm that conclusion.

So that’s a bit of a look at the LEN Masters Swimming championships, Day 1.

Day 2 events are the men’s and women’s 400m freestyle and 100m butterfly. You can follow the results and the live stream from here.

* To avoid any confusion, mywaterworld.life points out that the downloadable LEN results include world record times (WR).  These are the WR times at the date of the LEN Championships. These may not be the same times used in the FINA points calculation, which, for Long Course events are the WR times at 31 December 2021.