The purpose of the Endurance 1000 program is to encourage all swimmers to improve their fitness and endurance. The aim is to promote aerobic fitness by providing an incentive (in the form of club points) for members to swim longer distances.

The total number of swims (gaining points) that can be completed is 62 – broken down into:

• 25 individual 400m swims
• 25 individual 800m swims
• 3 by 1500m swims
• 3 by 30 minute swims
• 3 by 45 minute swims
• 3 by 60 minute swims

Points are gained for the completion of each different event, and are awarded according to age, sex and time taken to complete each swim. Points accrue to the club, and there is an annual competition between clubs all over Australia. Armadale Masters came a credible 30th out of 124 clubs that entered in 2013 with a total score of 2820 points.

As a coach I recommend that all memebrs participate in endurance/aerobic swimming as it helps build your fitness and stamina, it’s challenging as well as fun.  It is a good way to gauge your swimming from year to year.  It is also very good mental discipline.

Don’t be discouraged when you see that some of our members have swum 400m butterfly! Butterfly swims are not compulsory; nothing in the program is compulsory. You just swim the events that you want to swim.

If you haven’t tried endurance/aerobic swimming yet it’s not too late to start. You don’t need to be fast, you just need to complete the distance.   So come and give it a go on Sunday! or help out with timing duties

Timekeeping Tips

We have had a few timekeeping mishaps, the worst being when the I managed to stop both watches when the swimmer still had several laps to go!  Our policy of running two stopwatches for each swimmer overcomes most problems, including watch failure, but we still need to be careful.  The backup watch should always be kept purely as backup, and not stopped until it needs to be reset for the next swimmer.  With the timing watch it is safer to use the split button rather than the stop button at the end of the swim.

Jeff