2015 Swim-Gift Giving

If anybody would like to give a pair of Speedo Breaststroke Fins (Medium 7-9, blue) to a swim buddy (or give themselves a pair), I have a pair of like-new used ones I'd like to sell. After what I have been through with my hip surgery and rehab, breaststroke fins are permanently out for me. Send me a PM if you're interested in them!

Light blue tint goggles to my friends that have dark ones for use in outdoor pools and open water swims.

Has anyone tried out the Speedo Shine or the Moov trackers that are good in water? If so, what did you think of them? Kari My family got me a Moov for Christmas. I'll probably blog what I think of it after a week or so. But here's what I think after one workout and a day of use: I've played with a Garmin swim watch before and always been curious about these things. I felt the Garmin was clunky and would effect my stroke. But it was cool that it detected my stroke. Unfortunately I never really was able to look at the data it spit out. The Moov comes in a small cardboard box. I'm sure that my expression was more of puzzlement when I unwrapped it. Inside is a shiny round black device about the size of a smallish watch face and two stretchy plastic mesh bands. There's no display at all... just a red led that flashes when it synchs... or does something. The device fits neatly into the mesh bands one of which is for the wrist and one for the ankle. I haven't worn a watch in 20+ years so I'm still getting used to something being constantly attached to my wrist. As I've found out, this is something that you probably want on you 24/7. It tracks more than just workouts. It watches your activity levels throughout the day. It knows when you are sleeping and monitors both REM and "restorative" sleep. Its good that it is on all the time because I found the band to be a total pain in the neck to fasten. I'd hate to go through putting this on every morning to swim... well, maybe I'd get better at it after a few attempts. On Christmas day, it rained a LOT. My son was begging me to go out for a quick jog to test it and I almost did. But then the sky fell out and we got somewhere around 4 inches of rain over the next 2 hours. Supposedly, your smartphone will analyze your jogging steps and correct you as you run through your favorite audio device. With a jog out of the question, I just figured out how to synch it with the smartphone and occasionally viewed my sedentary activity over the rest of the day. I was very interested in the sleep part because I suspect I have some sort of sleep disorder. I went to bed around 10:00 PM and set an alarm for 7:00 AM so I could make the local Saturday USAS workout. Thunderstorms rumbled throughout the night. I awoke about 2:00 AM and moved to the couch. By then we had 3 children in our bed afraid of the storms... just wasn't any room left. In the morning, it told me I had gotten a total of 4.5 hours of sleep. ALL of that sleep was on the couch. So, either the storms kept me up, my kids kept me up or I'm having some sort of issue falling asleep... or it just didn't record my sleep correctly. I'll watch this over the next week and may need to see the doctor about it. At 8:00 AM, I headed to the pool for our workout. Setup is a little complicated but not too bad. From the main screen, you just pick the swimming icon and then "record a swim". From there, it sychs with the moov and sends you off to swim. Supposedly, it records 2 hours worth of data. Our workout went about 1:45 and it recorded everything. The band itself is comfortable in the water. I did notice it at times but it wasn't nearly as clunky as the Garmin I tried out. After the workout, you have to tell your smartphone to end the workout. From there, it synchs all the data and does an analysis on it. Synch took about 4 minutes and the analysis seems to take even longer. The interface lacks any indicator that something is happening during the analysis so I ended up accidentally cancelling it. I thought I had erased my workout and went back to just letting it monitor my activity levels. After trying to synch my activity about 1/2 hour later, I found that starting a workout actually stops the activity monitoring and it won't start back up until you dump your workout data. Fortunately, I didn't lose my workout data and after a few educated guesses, I figured out how to get the data uploaded. This time my patience with the data analysis paid off with a pretty detailed account of my swim workout. I probably won't have any issues with this now that I know how to do it but I felt the interface could have provided some better guidance. Now, for the workout: Warm-up #1 I did: 400 swim/200 kick Moov thought I did: 175 free/25 fly/250 free/5:00 rest I probably accidentally did 450 free since I was focusing on dps. That may be why it thought I did a 25 fly as well. It did not detect any kick at all. Warm-up #2 I did: 10 x 50 on :50 (2 x + 4 x ) Moov thought I did: 50 fly/50 bk/50 br/50 fly/50 bk/:15 rest/50 br/50 free/:18 rest/50 free/:20 rest/50 free/:21 rest/50 free So, this was kind of a mess. The :20 rest is probably way off because I struggle to make a 50 on :30. It interpreted the fly/bk as an IM transition that too a very long time to complete. Typically, I come in with 7-10 seconds of rest on a :50 interval. It's not like I was just doing touch and go at the wall on these. Not sure why it didn't interpret these correctly. Main Set #1 I did: 8 x Moov thought I did: Something sort of like above Here's one of the main drawbacks I've experienced with "auto stroke detection". It seems that these devices assume that when you start a 25 fly/25 back/25 br, you are going to be swimming a 100 IM. So, Moov just assumes that I'm taking an insanely long time to complete my breaststroke turn on the 75 IM and then tacks on the first 25 free from my next 125 free. Kick Set I did: 20 x 25 Kick on :30 Moov thought I did: Sat on the side of the pool for 10 minutes If you do a lot of kick, Moov isn't going to be useful to you at all. Maybe one day, they will figure out how to set up 2 Moov devices together (one on the ankle/one on the wrist) to track your kick rate with your stroke rate. I'd actually like to see this. Main set #2 I did: 2 x Moov thought I did: again... something similar The second big thing I noticed is that Moov doesn't like unconventional IM sets at all. Instead of 300 IM, it interprets it as 75 fly + 75 bk + 75 br + 75 free. It actually did a pretty good job reading my 200 Frees/100 IMs. The times seemed about right for what I normally do and the effort I was putting into them. I think it might have been giving me a few seconds less on the swim while adding a few extra seconds on my rest. If nothing else, it is flattering. The 25s were pretty much a wreck. It did a pretty poor job of determining when I was resting at the wall but it was accurate about what stroke I was swimming. On the second round, I did 100s of different strokes instead of IM. It had trouble detecting some of my butterfly turns. Back and *** turns detected just fine. I skipped the final 12 x 25 on :30. I think I did about 5900 yards total. It recorded only 5200 missing a couple of fly turns and all of the kick. So, from one day of use, here's my overall impression... Pros: comfortable, minimal impact on stroke, great detailed information on each lap swum Cons: Interface could be easier to use, does a poor job of detecting when you stop especially on non-conventional stroke sets, does not detect kick sets For a masters swimmer or triathlete churning out long freestyle sets, this is going to put together some very useful data. IMers and sprinters will probably get less value out of it. The technology just isn't there to give precise data for 25s, 50s or 100s. Hopefully, I'll be wrong about this and it will do a better job of detecting my rest in between intervals in the future. That said, the lifestyle features provide a lot of extra value. And if you are a multi-sport athlete, the Moov will have extended value with that as well. My team is heavy IM/Fly so, I'll probably lose some value out of the Moov. But I don't want to return it. It's still really cool even with its limitations.

Hey thanks for the writeup. I'll be interested to see in a week or two if things stabilize a bit once you and it become one. :) It sounds like the technology isn't quite there yet, but a few tweaks might help it. Hmm...

I appreciate the writeup, as well. I was similarly disappointed with the Garmin Swim. I'll be interested to hear how your experience evolves with the Moov, but it still seems like I might need to wait a few generations.

Here's an update after a week+ of usage: Sadly, not much has changed. Stroke detection is still hit or miss. I was curious if it was just me so I let my teammate (a far more accomplished swimmer than I) use the Moov for a 1000 IM he was planning to do. On each 50, I timed his split to check the accuracy of the Moov as well. Of the 20 50s, only 6 times were within a quarter second of the split I checked on my watch. Total time for the 1000 was 3 seconds slower that what I clocked. The error range per 50 was +/- 2.5s. It interpreted 5 butterfly lengths as freestyle and one backstroke length as breaststroke (seems like it should at least know when it is upside down). The +/- 2.5s per 50 error range makes the Moov Now practically useless for interval swimming. There's a pretty significant difference between a 50 on :38 and one on :40. On top of that, it frequently interprets short rest intervals as just very long turns. So, if I did 10x100 on 1:15 and came in at 1:12-1:13 for each, it would interpret it as one long 1000 yard swim with an extra long turn every 100 yards. There are other minor annoyances as well. For one thing, it averages your strokes per length and strokes per cycle for the whole workout. That's fine for one long freestyle swim but not very helpful when you are mixing strokes up and swimming at different rates. It would be more useful to break down these metrics by stroke but even then it may not be completely useful. The interface itself is clean and easy to read on your smartphone but I find it un-intuitive and hard to get around in. Sometimes it takes a couple tries to initiate a workout. When the workout is over, it downloads with a nice progress bar and then does nothing while it analyzes the data. There's nothing to tell you what it is doing or how long it will take. Typical download/analysis time is 6-8 minutes. Perhaps the most annoying thing is the fastener on the wristband. The band itself has holes spaces about a quarter inch apart. The fastener has two small pegs attached to a hard plastic square. The pegs fit through a specific spot on one end of the band and then through wherever it adjusts to your wrist on the other end of the band. It holds well during usage but the fastener has a habit of coming loose when you take the band off. I've nearly lost mine twice... once in the deep end of the pool. There are some things that might get better! Their website indicates that multiple Moovs for swimming will be coming soon. I hope that means I can start getting credit (more importantly metrics) on my kick. Supposedly, there's an API coming for developers. That's what I'd like to get ahold of more than anything else. Right now, you are stuck with their interpreted data on your smart phone ONLY. There's no website where you can log in and copy my swim over to a spreadsheet. I can't look and the raw data the Moov is generating. If I can get the raw data, I can possibly find a consistent pattern that shows when I've pushed off a wall or when I'm stopped at a wall. Along with the swim logging, I'm starting to explore the other activities the Moov monitors. These may well provide more benefit to my swimming than anything else. I'm 6 weeks away from my next meet, 20 lbs overweight and in the worst shape I've been in 3-4 years. I'm going to try working with the Moov 10 min toning workouts and begin some jogging. If only Moov would provide a mild electric shock when I reach for a bag of potato chips.

Ha! If only there were a good food shock collar. Love it! Thanks for the additional info and yes, it sounds like it might be better to hold off for a while longer. One of the guys on my team got one for Christmas too and has been having issues where it isn't recognizing strokes and times are off - similar to what you're reporting. Interesting.

Very useful information, Peter. Thanks!

Here's an update after a week+ of usage: You should probably send this to the moov creators. It might help them improve the software.