Enjoying my Garmin Swim

So at the end of last year my watch broke. The good old trusty Timex Ironman I used as a daily watch and as my pool watch. Sure it did laps (manually) but that was about it. I coudl keep track of my basic swim session but it required me to remember what strokes I did, how long sets were etc... Still, until it broke, it worked fine.

So I needed a new watch and the opportunity to get the Garmin Swim watch at a great price came up. So I said yes!

First off, it is a very nice daily watch. Not too big (I have small wrists), but plenty easy to see. It has the watch basics I need (stopwatch, time, alarm) and best of all it tracks my swims for me automatically. I feed it a small bit of info ahead of time (pool size, my weight etc...) and it tracks it all. It know what strokes I am doing, how long each set is, and all I need to do is hit pause when I stop for a rest. This is a major step up for my swimming (which let's be honest isn't great).

So no need to go into a full on review. There are tons of those online. But aside from being a way better tracker than my brain, this watch is great at letting me review how well a swim progresses "during" the swim. Before I coudl say that the set was 10 minutes long, but know I can see if I am too fast to start and then slow down, slow in the middle etc... That is great information. It also tracks my strokes per minute and as a bad swimming that is really nice. I have seen over the past few months that my spm is actually increasing ever so slightly. This gives me hope that I am actually progressing, and now that my heavy run training is winding down a bit, I can actually hit the pool a bit more often. So I hope to see that number climb even more.

There are other great options for swim watches as well, and this one does fail at not being usable outdoors. But the opportunity was too great to pass up, and I really love to pour over the numbers after a work out. So yay for me!