Swim watch

I just got a Garmin Swim. I spent two hours in the pool yesterday playing with it. What I LOVE about it is that I get splits for every length of the pool without hitting a button. Apparently I can negative split like nobody's business, no matter the length of the interval, no matter how fast the sprint or how steady the distance. This doesn't entirely suprise me but it's interesting to see. This feature has me a little puzzled as to why I have to hit the button at the end of the interval to get the timer to stop. I might play with that today and see if it's necessary or if it will pick up the rest. The free/back SPL data is fairly useless but I had figured that. I tend not to focus on SPL in those though and care much more about how many strokes in ***. As far as stroke detection, its a bit of a mess. In a 3,000 yard workout, it got all my free lengths fine, it logged my measly 100 yards of fly as free, and my paltry 100 yards back as back. But out of 1,000 yards of ***, it only correctly got 200 yards, the rest were marked as back. :-/ I did all of those as 25s or 50s in an attempt to see what what was throwing it off, with no real rhyme or reason. I started to get better accuracy when I decided it might be the positioning of the watch throwing it off (needing to be closer to the wrist, better centered and more snug) but eventually that started failing the detection as well. I tried playing with the width of my outsweep, the direction of my inscull, elbow position, etc. When I decided to try a length doing a recreational-style breaststroke with a slow, wide circular path and it finally logged as breaststroke, I almost wanted to smash the watch on the pool deck. I had read you could change the stroke in the final log but this is not the case. You can export the log to a 3rd party, edit the log and then import it back in. Humph. The statistics are fun but the ones garmin gives are largely useless. If I'm swimming 1/3 of my workout ***, my average pace is NOT going to be comparable to a workout that I do mostly free or entirely IM. Also average SPL is a joke when you are doing mixed strokes. It was neat to go into the detail log and see the SPL overlapped with the pace of the length. But the Garmin stats are largely geared towards the triathlete who mostly swims freestyle. They do not bother giving you statistics for any individual stroke at all. But, in a couple clicks you can import this into swim.com for free and get useful information. Like minutes, yards, SPL, average pace per stroke. Anyways, I gotta go swim (yay, more watch playing) but I was curious, too, to see what others had found with this watch and others.

I just got a Garmin Swim. I spent two hours in the pool yesterday playing with it. What I LOVE about it is that I get splits for every length of the pool without hitting a button. Apparently I can negative split like nobody's business, no matter the length of the interval, no matter how fast the sprint or how steady the distance. This doesn't entirely suprise me but it's interesting to see. This feature has me a little puzzled as to why I have to hit the button at the end of the interval to get the timer to stop. I might play with that today and see if it's necessary or if it will pick up the rest. The free/back SPL data is fairly useless but I had figured that. I tend not to focus on SPL in those though and care much more about how many strokes in ***. As far as stroke detection, its a bit of a mess. In a 3,000 yard workout, it got all my free lengths fine, it logged my measly 100 yards of fly as free, and my paltry 100 yards back as back. But out of 1,000 yards of ***, it only correctly got 200 yards, the rest were marked as back. :-/ I did all of those as 25s or 50s in an attempt to see what what was throwing it off, with no real rhyme or reason. I started to get better accuracy when I decided it might be the positioning of the watch throwing it off (needing to be closer to the wrist, better centered and more snug) but eventually that started failing the detection as well. I tried playing with the width of my outsweep, the direction of my inscull, elbow position, etc. When I decided to try a length doing a recreational-style breaststroke with a slow, wide circular path and it finally logged as breaststroke, I almost wanted to smash the watch on the pool deck. I had read you could change the stroke in the final log but this is not the case. You can export the log to a 3rd party, edit the log and then import it back in. Humph. The statistics are fun but the ones garmin gives are largely useless. If I'm swimming 1/3 of my workout ***, my average pace is NOT going to be comparable to a workout that I do mostly free or entirely IM. Also average SPL is a joke when you are doing mixed strokes. It was neat to go into the detail log and see the SPL overlapped with the pace of the length. But the Garmin stats are largely geared towards the triathlete who mostly swims freestyle. They do not bother giving you statistics for any individual stroke at all. But, in a couple clicks you can import this into swim.com for free and get useful information. Like minutes, yards, SPL, average pace per stroke. Anyways, I gotta go swim (yay, more watch playing) but I was curious, too, to see what others had found with this watch and others.