The Saturday that vanished
This is not a guide to building a complete tracking system. That is How to Track Swimming Times. It is not a tools comparison either — that is spreadsheet versus swimming app. The balcony how-to — why Meet Mobile lags, why a Sunday Level 1 never appears, how not to refresh into a panic — is how to use Meet Mobile. This is the lost-PB story: the number everyone celebrated on Saturday that nobody can find in February.
Irish club swimming runs on WhatsApp. The Team Manager drops the start-list PDF. Someone on the balcony photographs the board. A parent forwards Meet Mobile. The child texts 1:08.42 with a dripping emoji. By Monday the kit is in the machine and the time is “in the chat”. That feels like keeping it. It is not.
A personal best swimming tracker, if you want to call it that, is boring on purpose: event, course, time to the hundredth, date, gala. One list you still open after a club change, a phone upgrade, and a summer in a 50-metre pool. Everything else is a postcard from the day.
Why unofficial times vanish
People talk about “losing a PB” as if the clock un-swam it. The swim happened. What vanished is the record. Unofficial times vanish because nobody was ever required to keep them.
A Level 1 Irish gala — the club fundraiser, the inter-club splash, often the first race after a first Irish gala — does not put times on the Swim Ireland national database. Clubs record them. The public Rank tab is Level 3 and higher, as general reference. You can watch a genuine 1:14.86, open rankings on Monday, and find a blank. The database was never shown that swim.
Even at a licensed meet with pads, the first number on the board is often unofficial: touchpad, not yet signed off. A light touch, a DQ still walking, a backup button — the official time can move. If you only kept the live screenshot, you may have kept a first draft.
Then there is the hole in the middle: the host never uploaded, the Meet Mobile meet was never listed, the Hy-Tek file sat on one laptop, the WhatsApp photo compressed into mush. The child still swam. Your archive did not.
A hand-timed Level 1 50 free is a real Saturday. It is not a seed for a national meet and it should not overwrite an official PB. Write it. Mark the bucket. That is how the year your swimmer learned to race still exists in March.
WhatsApp is not an archive
If you swim in Ireland, the squad chat is the noticeboard, the heat sheet, the results desk, and the congratulations card. I am not arguing with that. I am arguing with treating it as a filing cabinet.
Chats get archived when the noise is too much. People mute, leave, or get added to a new “U12 parents 2026/27” group and the old one goes cold. A child changes clubs and you leave the WhatsApp the same week — taking the social life of the times with you. Search is useless when every photo is a wet scoreboard and the caption is “well done love”. Media compresses. Phones fill up. Somebody deletes the chat to “free space” before a holiday.
The screenshot was never the PB. It was a receipt. Receipts go in a drawer you can still open. WhatsApp is a drawer that rearranges itself.
Meet Mobile vs official lists
Meet Mobile is Hy-Tek’s live app. When a host publishes a meet, you can follow heats and results on your phone. At bigger Irish weekends — Leinster, Connacht Open, Irish Open, McCullagh — it is often there. At a Sunday Level 1 in a leisure centre, it often is not. The app only knows what the operator uploaded, on an internet connection that leisure-centre Wi-Fi may not have.
Live times usually arrive as unofficial. Treat them as a first look, not the carved number. Officials still check pads, backups, and DQs. The time that counts is the one after that. Meet Mobile is also not a lifetime diary. Hosts publish at their discretion. The live window is short — typically the meet itself plus about a week of host activation. After that, searching for last October’s invite can feel like the meet never happened.
Official lists are a different object again. Swim Ireland rankings, Hy-Tek result files, a PDF on the host site — those are the published book for licensed meets that completed the paperwork. They are a filter, not a family history. They skip Level 1. They lag while paperwork sits. They will not remember the unofficial 50 fly that made a nine-year-old grin in September. Racing in England? The sibling page is why isn't the time on British Rankings.
Use Meet Mobile on the day — the parent how-to is how to use Meet Mobile without refreshing into a panic. Use rankings when you need a published seed. Do not let either of them be the only place last best lives.
Paper programmes in the recycling
Some club galas still sell a printed programme. Parents scribble times in the margin, fold it into a coat, and mean to keep it. It goes in the recycling with the coffee cups, or it lives in the glove box until it is pulp. The wet notebook in the kit bag is the same story: honest on Saturday, gone by the club change.
A photo of the marked programme is still a source. Transcribe it before the ink runs. The row is the archive. The paper was the day.
Club change and the new phone
Two quiet ways to lose a year. First, the club change: new hat, new WhatsApp, new Team Manager. The old Hy-Tek file is not yours. The new club will ask for times. If your answer is “it was in the old group”, you are starting from NT in more events than you think. Second, the phone upgrade: camera roll not fully backed up, Meet Mobile logged out, screenshots that never hit iCloud. The child still knows they went 1:08. Something. Hundredths are how the sport keeps score. “About 1:08” is not a seed.
Take the history with you the way you take the SI number. Event, course, time, date. That list does not belong to the old chat.
The PB you never had
Sometimes nothing vanished. You mixed the clocks. A short-course 100 free of 1:08.42 and a long-course 100 free of 1:11.18 are not a drop and an add. They are two races. Extra turns make 25m faster. If you keep one “best 100 free”, you will crown the winter swim and treat every honest 50-metre gala as a failure — or you will paste a converted estimate into the PB column and think you own a time nobody swam.
That is how families tell me they “lost” a PB over the summer. They did not. They compared two courses. Keep a best for each event in each course. The physics, and the Irish season, sit in Short Course vs Long Course.
Do not let a converted time, a balcony watch, or a Meet Mobile unofficial overwrite the official PB you will need as a seed. Write those swims. Do not let them steal the column.
What gets lost vs what to keep
Keep the sources if they help on the day. Copy the facts into one list that will still be there after the chat dies.
| What gets lost | Why it vanishes | What to keep instead |
|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp screenshot | Chat archived, group left, media compressed, search is hopeless | A typed row: event, time, course, date, gala |
| Meet Mobile | Host must publish; live window is short; Level 1 often never listed | The official time once it is signed off — in your list |
| Paper programme | Recycling, wet kit bag, glove-box pulp | Transcribe the margin before you bin it |
| National rankings | Level 1 never entered; Rank tab is Level 3+; paperwork lag | Family history including unofficial, marked as such |
| Old phone / old club | Upgrade without backup; you leave the WhatsApp | A log you own, not a chat you were added to |
| One mixed “best time” | 25m and 50m treated as the same race | A PB per event and per course |
A time history by event and course
Here is what “never lose a PB” actually looks like. Not a wall of screenshots. A line you can still read. Same event, same course, every race left on the page — drops, adds, the ugly January invite. The PB is the lowest point on that line, not a photo of a 4.
Illustrative 100 freestyle. September Level 1 is unofficial and still on the page. November 1:08.42 is the short-course PB until March. January’s amber dot is a first long-course swim — a new column, not a stolen winter PB. Names and times are examples.
I keep that history in Finzy: personal bests by event and course, plus the swims that got you there. You type them. Finzy does not auto-import official results — rankings miss Level 1 and anything the host never uploaded, and I will not pretend an import fills a hole it cannot see. Screenshot the scoreboard once. Finzy is where it lives forever.
One screenshot for the memory. Then six facts into the list: event, time, course, date, gala, official or unofficial. If it was a PB in that event and that course, say so in the car. If it was a good long-course first swim, say that — not “you were slower than November”.
Drive-home checklist
Better in the car park than in a panic the week entries close.
- ✓Screenshot the scoreboard or Meet Mobile once — then put the phone down.
- ✓Write event, time to the hundredth, and course (SC 25m or LC 50m). Never skip course.
- ✓Date and gala name. Future-you will not remember which invite it was.
- ✓Mark official, unofficial, or converted. Only an official faster swim in the same event and course updates the PB.
- ✓If Meet Mobile still says unofficial, wait for the signed result before you crown it.
- ✓Leave the WhatsApp photo where it is. Do not treat the chat as the filing cabinet.
- ✓If you change clubs or phones this year, export or open the same list on the new device before you wipe the old one.
Screenshot the scoreboard once. Finzy is where it lives forever — event, course, and every swim that got you there.
