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Swimovate: the Pool-Mate

Swimming can affect people in strange ways. For example, I have several degrees in math, can do integral calculus in my head, and teach college algebra because I think its fun, but put me in a pool and all of a sudden I lose the ability to count to 10. I’ve tried repeating the number of the current lap over and over in my head, tried using letters instead of numbers, and tried wearing a lap counter that you wear as a ring and have to remember to press at the end of every lap. None of these really worked consistently for me. As a relatively new (just a few years) swimmer, there’s just too many technique items to think about for me to easily also keep track of lap counts, stroke counts, and all the other things that swim coaches care so deeply about. Being something of a gadget freak, when I was offered the chance to try out a new swimming watch from Swimovate that was described as a “bike computer for swimming”, I eagerly said yes.

The Pool-mate is about the size and shape of a Polar heart rate monitor watch, much smaller than my Garmin 310XT. It tracks laps, stroke count, distance, time, speed / 100 meters, calories, and a measure of efficiency based on Swim Golf (lap time + strokes / lap). It tracks these on a per-lap, per-set, and total per workout basis, works with both open and flip / tumble turns, and can recognize all 4 major strokes so long as you don’t switch in the middle of a length.

In the box I found the watch, what I thought was a quick reference card (but turned out to be an advertisement), and some fold-out instructions. The directions for setting up the watch for use were clear enough, although the British origins of the device are clear – your weight must be entered in kilograms and the pool length in meters (I hope that either a US version in pounds and yards appears, or, even better, a version with user-settable units). There is no software to install, no battery to charge before use, and no download cable. The directions make consistent reference to holding the Start button for 2 seconds in order to stop the current activity and return to a higher-level state (e.g., a ‘main menu’ for a given activity). It also seemed to me that there were some undocumented timeouts – I would have the watch in a certain place in the menu / activity system and pause to read more instructions only to discover that when I turned my attention back to the watch, the display was no longer in the same state it was when I last looked at it.

I decided to swim with the watch in the morning and read through the instructions for use while swimming, realizing that I’d want them close at hand while in the pool for the first few times. At this point, I wished that the small cardboard bifold advertisement was actually a small laminated / waterproof cheat sheet, with just the diagrams / instructions needed when swimming.

I swam with the watch twice before writing this – the first was just some loosely structured swimming, a lap or 2 at a time – I’d use the wall clock for time and count my strokes for a lap or two, then stop and look at the watch to compare. The second day was an actual swim practice with a mixture of specified swim and drill sets that I could use to see how well the watch (and I) dealt with selectively recording the swim sets while avoiding the drills. The drills were done with the watch in Pause mode, easy to see because there is a capital ‘P’ to the left of the time. Swimming mode is indicated by the absence of the ‘P’ and the presence of something the instructions referred to as the ‘swim icon’. The watch face drawings in the instructions were too small to clearly show what this icon (I was expecting an image of some sorts) looked like. I eventually figured out that the ‘swim icon’ was actually the word ‘SWIM’ in very tiny type in the center of the display.

The short version of the verdict is that the watch does what it says it does – the stroke counts, lap counts, and times were accurate when compared with the wall clock and the written workout I was going against on day 2, which makes it a pretty remarkable device, and definitely a keeper. I made sure I had a strong push-off and streamline off the wall, which made it easy for the built-in accelerometers (I presume these are at the heart of how the device works) to detect the start of a new length. What the watch reports as stroke count is exactly what is measured – if you wear it on your left wrist, what you see is the number of strokes with your left arm. If you start and / or finish a lap with a stroke from the arm that doesn’t have the watch on it, the actual count will be 1 or 2 strokes different than what the watch reports.

Speaking of stroke count, it’s possible to review the statistics for a swim set while you are in the pool by using the buttons to scroll through the data fields. When doing so, I saw a series of 2 or 3 letter abbreviations in the upper left corner of the display – CA, TL, SK, M, etc. I eventually figured out that ‘M’ was probably Meters, CA was Calories, and SK was (I think) Stroke Count. I looked in both the documentation and the website for some definition of what all these abbreviations were but never found one, so this would be a useful addition to the documentation.

Each workout is saved in a separate log file, and the watch has a capacity for 400 of these. It’s possible to select a log file, and scroll through the summary statistics for that workout – lap count, avg speed / 100 meters, distance, total time, etc. It’s also possible to gio down another level of detail and look at the same data for each set. It’s not clear (and not mentioned anywhere that I could find) if it’s possible to do something like look at individual set items (say each 500 in a set of several) to see how stroke count or efficiency changed during or between each 500. But with this much data now available, the desire to be able do download it it all for further analysis / comparison/ visualization is overwhelming. While it’s possible to review much of the data recorded, the small screen and 4 buttons isn’t the best choice for this sort of review.

However, given that there isn’t any other way of recording this data at all, outside of a coach on deck or the possibly overburdened memory of the swimmers themselves, these are quibbles, easily overlooked in a first generation device because the value that it provides for the serious swimmer is, I think, quite substantial.

- Chris Esposito, Rocket Scientist, Ironman Finisher, and Team Vo2Multisport team member