64 Chapter 4 Inclusion criteria For the purpose of this study, it was important to outline the development of pacing behavior from a young age on toward the age of peak performance. Peak performance in competitive swimming is on reached at 24 (±2) years for males and at 22 (±2) years for females (Allen et al., 2015). Therefore, only swimmers who had at least one swim performance in the age category of 22 years or older (male) or 20 years or older (female) were included. To ensure a dataset representing the developmental pathway of pacing behavior towards peak performance, swim performances after the swimmer’s career-best swim performance were excluded. To longitudinally study pacing behavior development, included swimmers had to be between 12 and 24 years old and have performance data with 50m split times in at least three swimming seasons. To study pacing behavior independent of current performance, split times of each 50m section were converted into relative section times (RST), representing the percentage of the total race time spent in one section. The inclusion criteria were conducted for the 100m and 200m events separately. Swim performances of multiple generations (i.e., from 2000 through 2021) were included in the dataset, which necessitated the correction of evolution in competitive swimming. As such, swim performances were defined as a percentage of the prevailing world record (WR) of the corresponding sex, referred to as relative Season Best Time (rSBT) (Post et al., 2020; Stoter et al., 2019). World records from 2008 and 2009 were replaced by the prevailing fastest time in a textile swimsuit. According to the event, swimmers were allocated to the elite, sub-elite or high-competitive performance group by using their event-specific all-time rSBT after 20 (female) or 22 (male) years of age (see Table 1). The elite level was defined as the average rSBT of the 50th swimmer of the event-specific FINA World Ranking List between 2016 and 2021 (FINA, 2021). Sub-elite level and high-competitive level were defined as the average rSBT of the 8th and 50th swimmer of the event-specific National Ranking List of the Netherlands between 2016 and 2021 (FINA, 2021). Swimmers with a best rSBT outside the limits of the high-competitive group were excluded from further analysis. For the 100m event, this resulted in 3,498 swimmers (1,659 female) with 15,960 observations (7,384 female) with an average of 5.3 ± 1.9 observations per swimmer. For the 200m event, this resulted in 2,230 swimmers (1,252 female) with 10,309 observations (5,412 female) with an average of 5.3 ± 1.9 observations per swimmer.
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