News

To bring in the New Year with a bang, the club has decided to introduce a new programme called E500.

For those of you who don’t know, the club has always taken part in the Vorgee E1000 (Endurance) program. It was designed to encourage people to compete in distances from 400m to 60 minutes duration in a variety of strokes. It consists of 62 swims and you gain points for each swim. You can find more information about the E1000 on the masters swimming website.

Our club has decided to introduce a new program that doesn’t require the ability to swim Butterfly. The E500 therefore has no Butterfly or Individual Medley (IM) swims. It will consist of 2 nominated strokes (choose from Freestyle, Breaststroke or Backstroke) and instead of only being distances of 400m and above it will also include 200m swims.

The E500 swims will consist of:
200m x 8
400m x 8
800m x 8
per stroke. As well as one swim per stroke of each of 1500m, 30 minute, 45 minute and 1 hour. That’s a total 28 swims per stroke. So 56 swims overall.

In the E1000, points are awarded based on A, B & C times/distances. Therefore the E500 points will be as per Masters E1000 with times/points added for the 200m swims per age group.

Unfortunately, you will not be able to take part in both E500 and E1000. Therefore you will need to make a decision which programme you wish to take part in each year.

You will find that the yearly swim program that the club puts together will provide plenty of opportunities to complete the E500 swims.

For example, in 2019:
200m swims – there are 33 opportunities and you need 16 to complete the program.
400m swims – there are 42 opportunities and you need 16 to complete the program.
800m swims – there are 26 opportunities and you need 16 to complete the program.

So the suggested program continues to provide opportunity for all swimmers to complete either the E500 or the E1000 in a year.