Gps swim watch

I'll post here what I shared in a few different PMs ... First, some background. I'm in my early 50s now and have been a competitive swimmer since I was about 7 or 8 years old. It's all I really like to do for exercise! I really don't like to wear watches (even on land) and have pretty much always resisted wearing a watch while swimming. Years ago, when the original Garmin Swim came out, someone got it for me and I grudgingly tried it, but just didn't find it useful for pool swimming. Fast forward to our pandemic times. When our pools closed (I now live about 90 minutes north of Toronto, Canada), I reverted to walking/hiking as my main form of exercise. In mid-May, though, I got a tip on a nearby, shallow lake that had finally become warm enough to swim in with a wetsuit. I did a bit of research and decided that the Garmin Swim 2 watch could be a good option for measuring my swim distances in my lake swim. I did read good reviews of the Apple Watch, but, as I don't wear a watch, just didn't feel like I needed all those other bells and whistles. Here's what I like/love about the Garmin Swim 2: Low profile and snug fit. I really don't notice it when I'm swimming, except when I get the alert buzz that I've completed a lap/gone a certain distance. This is REALLY important to me ... back to me hating watches :) I'm very confident that the open water swim distance measurements are pretty darn accurate. So, it seems to go a great job for wild swimming. Though the user interface is not the most intuitive, I do like that you can customize the 'data fields' that show on the watch face. I have my main OW screen set to just show distance so that, at any point, I can pause a bit and easily see how far I've gone. I can usually do that mid-stroke without much of a pause as the font is large enough if you limit the screen to showing only one 'data element' (e.g., distance). I like the 'Lap' feature (which, in metric, is set at 500M) as, when you turn that feature on, you get both a physical buzz (which you can feel) and an audio buzz, and then for a bit, the watch face shows you your time on that lap. This is helpful, as well, for judging speed if you're trying to swim for time/pace. You can also add additional alerts based upon time, distance or other metrics. So, I was doing one virtual open water event that had both a Half-Ironman (1930 meters) and Ironman (3860 meters) distance, so I added an alert every 965 meters so I'd know when I was halfway through the Half, etc. I really don't wear the watch in the pool because I don't need it except for one specific use: I do a heart-rate test set to assess my fitness every 4-6 weeks. The heart rate monitor seems to do a good job measuring HR even in the water, so I use it for that. (That test set came from Dave Salo and I summarize it in this recent post -www.1001pools.com/single-pos...-testing-1-2-3) Finally, on land, while I don't run, I have a 4-5K trail walk that I can do from my house. I set the watch on the run mode and it gives me good feedback on distance and pace. The 'GPS map tracks' on both the swim function and the run function are awesome and fun. Here's what is sub-par about the watch: It works really well for freestyle and backstroke, but seems to get messed up if you're doing a lot of breaststroke. I think that's because the watch needs to be out of the water fairly frequently to stay in synch with the GPS satellites. That's not a big deal for me as I am pretty much only doing freestyle in open water, but I have noticed that and other people have commented on that. If you are wearing it in the pool and do things other than swimming (e.g., drills, kicking), it does NOT do a good job of tracking distance. There's a bit of funkiness to get the watch set up initially with the Garmin Connect app, and to alter watch faces with a different Garmin app (IQ) ... but once I figured that out, Garmin Connect works well and I haven't changed the main watch face.

I'll post here what I shared in a few different PMs ... First, some background. I'm in my early 50s now and have been a competitive swimmer since I was about 7 or 8 years old. It's all I really like to do for exercise! I really don't like to wear watches (even on land) and have pretty much always resisted wearing a watch while swimming. Years ago, when the original Garmin Swim came out, someone got it for me and I grudgingly tried it, but just didn't find it useful for pool swimming. Fast forward to our pandemic times. When our pools closed (I now live about 90 minutes north of Toronto, Canada), I reverted to walking/hiking as my main form of exercise. In mid-May, though, I got a tip on a nearby, shallow lake that had finally become warm enough to swim in with a wetsuit. I did a bit of research and decided that the Garmin Swim 2 watch could be a good option for measuring my swim distances in my lake swim. I did read good reviews of the Apple Watch, but, as I don't wear a watch, just didn't feel like I needed all those other bells and whistles. Here's what I like/love about the Garmin Swim 2: Low profile and snug fit. I really don't notice it when I'm swimming, except when I get the alert buzz that I've completed a lap/gone a certain distance. This is REALLY important to me ... back to me hating watches :) I'm very confident that the open water swim distance measurements are pretty darn accurate. So, it seems to go a great job for wild swimming. Though the user interface is not the most intuitive, I do like that you can customize the 'data fields' that show on the watch face. I have my main OW screen set to just show distance so that, at any point, I can pause a bit and easily see how far I've gone. I can usually do that mid-stroke without much of a pause as the font is large enough if you limit the screen to showing only one 'data element' (e.g., distance). I like the 'Lap' feature (which, in metric, is set at 500M) as, when you turn that feature on, you get both a physical buzz (which you can feel) and an audio buzz, and then for a bit, the watch face shows you your time on that lap. This is helpful, as well, for judging speed if you're trying to swim for time/pace. You can also add additional alerts based upon time, distance or other metrics. So, I was doing one virtual open water event that had both a Half-Ironman (1930 meters) and Ironman (3860 meters) distance, so I added an alert every 965 meters so I'd know when I was halfway through the Half, etc. I really don't wear the watch in the pool because I don't need it except for one specific use: I do a heart-rate test set to assess my fitness every 4-6 weeks. The heart rate monitor seems to do a good job measuring HR even in the water, so I use it for that. (That test set came from Dave Salo and I summarize it in this recent post -www.1001pools.com/single-pos...-testing-1-2-3) Finally, on land, while I don't run, I have a 4-5K trail walk that I can do from my house. I set the watch on the run mode and it gives me good feedback on distance and pace. The 'GPS map tracks' on both the swim function and the run function are awesome and fun. Here's what is sub-par about the watch: It works really well for freestyle and backstroke, but seems to get messed up if you're doing a lot of breaststroke. I think that's because the watch needs to be out of the water fairly frequently to stay in synch with the GPS satellites. That's not a big deal for me as I am pretty much only doing freestyle in open water, but I have noticed that and other people have commented on that. If you are wearing it in the pool and do things other than swimming (e.g., drills, kicking), it does NOT do a good job of tracking distance. There's a bit of funkiness to get the watch set up initially with the Garmin Connect app, and to alter watch faces with a different Garmin app (IQ) ... but once I figured that out, Garmin Connect works well and I haven't changed the main watch face.