Swimming really is a lifelong sport; it's low impact and promotes participation. The beauty of masters swimming is that you can keep competing forever... seriously... FOREVER! Just check the World Records for the 100-104 and there have even been two swims in the 105-109 category!
There are also plenty of great meets to participate in that are extremely competitive. I am currently preparing for the British Masters Championships in June and I have plenty of swimmers on my online training program ramping up to the World Masters Championships in Kyushu, Japan!
The Worlds meet will take place in the same venue as the main world championships in the weeks following, how cool is that? Just have a look at some masters world records and it is clear that Japan takes their senior swimming very seriously. This will be a very FAST meet!
All that being said, arguably the most competitive nation in the world for masters is the US. They recently had the US Masters Championships in Irvine California, and it was a display of awesomeness! The meet featured more than 23 Olympians; Nathan Adrian, Anthony Ervin, Vlad Morozov, Jenny Thompson, Melissa Belote Ripley and Markus Rogan were just some of the big names lining up behind the blocks!
I can't find the exact number right now but I am also pretty sure there were roughly 2500 entrants. You can be any level from literally a multiple-time Olympic champion to someone who started competitive swimming after retirement. All while being in sunny California and having a great time. What is not to love? One of those 2500 swimmers was Michael Grados, a keen masters fanatic and someone who has been in and out swimming since his college days. When I first started up this website at the end of November 2022, he signed up for my "Masters Plan" with the goal of swimming all-time masters PBs at USMS Nationals!
After Michael had signed up we jumped on a Zoom call (included in my plans) and talked about the goals he had over the next 5 months. They were mainly focused on the 50/100y Fly & Free events he would be entering at USMS Nationals. When he signed up he had just swum a tapered meet where at 44 he was swimming masters bests (basically lifetime bests with the exception of college age and younger). His main goal was to see how far under these times he could get! Here are the times he had swam (tapered), the week of joining my course, and the times he went at nationals, after 20 weeks of my training program.
Base Time | Nationals Time | |
50 Free | 22.84 | 22.54 |
100 Free | 49.74 | 49.80 |
50 Fly | 23.92 | 23.53 |
100 Fly | 53.23 | 52.67 |
I was personally pretty stoked with the outcome. The 100 free was the only event he did not improve on from before the program but every other event saw pretty serious drops. Especially 0.3 & 0.4 on the 50 events, showing MASSIVE improvements in pure speed, the aspect of swimming which is by far the hardest to improve (aerobic capacity is much simpler, you just work harder). Michael returned from USMS Nationals with a couple of medals, 3 masters bests and a monstrous 23.1 50y fly relay split.
You can also probably identify that his fly events saw more dramatic improvements and that is because a couple of weeks into the program Michael told me another tidbit of information. Ever since becoming a masters swimmer, he has dreamed of getting under 2 minutes for the 200y Butterfly. This was obviously quite a radically different request to trying to get faster at the pure sprint events and required a little bit of grind without knackering Michael to succeed at swimming fast.
As this wasn't an original goal Michael had not entered the 2fly for nationals and instead entered a smaller meet the weekend before. Michael powered to a massive 1:59.66 at the Ithaca masters meet to achieve a goal he'd been coming up short of for over 5 years. A lot of masters swimmers will tell you that not getting slower as you age is a huge achievement on its own. Michael surpassed that goal, and though he was the oldest in his category (he will move to the 45-49 age band in 2024), he still hit masters bests in 4 of the 5 events he swam while on my 20-week training plan and achieved something he had been unable to reach since being in his 30s.
If you are someone like me who is no longer a full-time swimmer and needs a purpose to train or you have been finding masters a bit of a grind with no real improvement, you really should consider one of my online training programmes and see what goals you can achieve with it! Just like Michael, you can make dreams goals and goals a reality!
Sign up for my training plans at the link below! Do reach out with any questions you may have about any of the plans.
Whether or not you are doing my training plans or are with a club team, turn up rocking my t-shirt and swim in my custom swim cap!
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