3 May 2022
I started back Masters swimming in 2001, twelve years after I had "retired" from the sport after my last Southwest Conference Championships meet in March of 1989. My wife encouraged me back in the water, principally because I was a stress case due to work, but I also knew I needed the sport physically. When I had finished up my collegiate swimming career, I weighed 185 pounds; by 2001, I was easily 205 and maybe pushing 210. I was heading in the wrong direction.
After getting re-hooked on swimming over 2001, I began tracking all sorts of metrics about my training regimen, including my weight. Though I didn't track every day (and, apparently, much of 2005 and 2006**), I built up a nice dataset:
I've always told people that my "setpoint" is around 190 and my "swim fast" point is closer to 185. The data above and this annualized chart ...
... bear this out as:
My average over all of the data points since 2002 is 190.5
I swam most of my Masters' "Lifetime" bests in the 2011 to 2012 timeframe
Now, weight doesn't entirely translate to swimming fast, but I know I swim better when I lug less lard. I'm happy to see I'm making progress in the right direction since I had "re-peaked" during the 2020 pandemic.
** During 2005 to 2007, I was enmeshed in probably the most fun I have ever had professionally, with loads of global travel - some months spending time in Japan one week, Belgium the next and back home to Arizona in between. While it was one of the very rare periods where I could say I deeply enjoyed my work, my swimming (and data tracking) did suffer during that time.
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