Gadgets

The Jetsons may have possessed levitated dog-walking treadmills, cushy jobs in automated cog factories, and genetic advancements that allowed two redheads to give birth to blond children...but I'm not sure their lives were any better than ours. After all, their house was monitored by a horrifying robot scullery drone, their pet was as annoying as Scooby-Doo (but without any mystery-solving abilities), and their son was beaten up at school every day for having the misfortune of being named "Elroy."

Our society, on the other hand, has grocery aisles full of Easter candy shortly after New Years, videos of girls playing VanHalen solos, and all sorts of electronic training aids for data-starved athletes.

My friends and training role models Kim and Rich recently acquired the Garmin Swim training tool, which uses an accelerometer to measure your yardage in a pool workout. Since GPS devices don't get a signal within a building enclosure, several vendors have developed these doodads, which are supposed to sense your wrist movements and deduce what stroke you're swimming. A sudden change in direction is interpreted as the completion of a length of the pool.

The device pictured here is the Finis SwimSense.After reading comparisons of the Finis to the Garmin, it appeared that they both did the same thing about equally well. The Finis, though, was supposed to detect idle time (standing at the wall), while the Garmin required you to hit the button if you didn't want the rest period to be included in your swim time. That was enough to sway me toward the Swimsense.

I've used it at a couple of workouts now, and it does seem to detect my strokes and lengths reasonably well. But as with any technological tool, the biggest problem is the operator. Since your arm doesn't have interpretable accelerations during kick and drill sets, you're supposed to pause the watch when you do those things. This is tough enough to remember, but the part I've really struggled with is remembering to un-pause it when the swim sets start back up. So far, I have managed to accurately record my warmups...and that's about it.

New habits must be developed. Oh, I'm sure I'll be able to master the pause/unpause mindset eventually, but it's going to take a while. I've been doing the same thing for too many years to break out of my old routines easily. And it's not just when the set starts and ends -- as coach, I have to remember that my accelerometer doesn't know how to interpret my movements when I stop to yell at the slackers who aren't streamlining off the walls or doing two-hand touches on their butterfly. (I don't want to take time out from my own workout to harrass people, but it's my job. And if that requires pausing my watch, well, so be it.)

After I'm figured out the online tracking software, I'll share my thoughts about it, and about whether I think such a gizmo is a valuable training aid...or merely a distracting toy. Stay tuned. In the meantime, have a great day!