Following up on last week’s post, I took the plunge. I’ve used my new smart swim goggles for two swims! I have to confess I was feeling a bit dubious after fumbling through the set up process, but the results were impressive. Admittedly, there was some user error involved getting the goggles to sync with my phone. After a few failed attempts and some internet searching, I discovered “location” needed to be activated on my phone for the sync to work. I also didn’t realize that features, such as the workouts, requires a premium subscription. Almost everything requires a subscription. Even so, there are still plenty of cool features for a newbie like me to explore.
After figuring out the setup I headed to the pool. I wasn’t sure what to expect toggling through the goggle’s options before landing on “open swim”. This is basically the only option available without a subscription. I started going through the same warm up I’ve been doing for about 10 years. Before the goggles I suspected my times were slower. The goggles confirmed that I’m about three minutes slower. For swimmers, a few seconds can be a big difference so three minutes is huge.
My warm up is 20 laps. I alternate between front crawl, backstroke, and breaststroke. While swimming, the goggles projected the total time and distance by default. I felt vaguely disappointed that I didn’t have more details during the swim. However, once the swim synced with my phone everything changed. Somehow the goggles accurately detected when I changed strokes and calculated a whole bunch of information about them. The results surprised me. I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be so accurate.
The stroke statistics offered measurements on the time spent at each stroke, the distance per stroke, and a few other things. They also measure something called “SWOLF” which is a combination of the time and number of strokes. Below are some examples of the statistics from my second swim. There was some user error on my first swim and a few things didn’t record correctly.
I haven’t figured out what everything means yet. I also haven’t figured out if having the stats will affect my relationship with swimming. For the moment I’m enjoying the new perspective, which is definitely giving me some new energy after 25+ years of lap swimming. This is definitely one of my top 10 favorite gifts.