First swim of 2015 and with the Garmin Swim

It only took me a week, but I completed my first swim of 2015 this evening. Thanks to my busy holiday schedule and the pool closure through January 2nd, I haven't been able to get in a swim until tonight.  

Of course it was starting to look like I wasn't going to be able to swim tonight as I pulled into the Fontana Parks Aquatics Center parking lot. There wasn't a single car in the lot! As I was trying to figure out what was going on, I got a phone call from my teammate Chad, asking if I was swimming tonight. I told him "Yes, but there is no one at the pool." He chuckled and said that this week the management moved our practices to the community pool not too far away. 

So anyways, I got to the pool about 30 minutes into the workout, but I felt comfortable with that since I wanted to take it easy since I hadn't been in the pool since mid-December. Once I got in, I started to do my usual warm up set. I was halfway across the pool on my first lap when it dawned on me: this is my first time swimming with my Garmin Swim wristwatch!! I need to get it set up. I finished the 50 and stopped on the wall. I pressed the button to get the watch into Swim mode and started my warm up over. 

As I would push off the wall, I would occasionally look at my watch when I was gliding, and every time the watch was correct. It indeed was tracking my laps and my yards for the evening. I paused it in between sets as the instructions said. At the end of the evening I stopped the recording and saved the session. 

The only problems that I encounter this first time out was 1). forgetting to start the watch at the beginning of a new set, and B). it doesn't work when you start your drill set in the middle of the pool. One of the sets I was given this evening was to start at the middle of the pool, doing 6x25s to practice my freestyle flip turns. So if you look at the screenshot above from the Garmin Connect, you will see that the watch said I did 1,200 yards, but with that drill set, the 50 I forgot about, and the 200 yards that I did that I forgot to start, I actually go in 1,600 yards to tonight. Not too bad for me when I got in so late. 

When I got home, I grabbed my light "dinner" and fired up my laptop. I inserted the USB antenna and within a few minutes, the laptop and the watch had discovered each other and were uploading data with no further interaction from me. Now was my opportunity to see how the Garmin Connect web site worked with my data. As I mentioned above, the data this little watch showed was amazing! 

I spent about an hour, just digging around the Connect web site and see what it could do. I discovered that from this data, I could see my 100 yd pace, my stroke count, and my SWOLF score, per lap! Yes, I could see how fast I was swimming at every lap and how many strokes I take on any lap! Wow! It also reports on how many minutes you swim, how many minutes from beginning to end (so it includes those resting moments), and even how many calories you burned doing this. I remain skeptical on the calorie number, as I've read in the past that with my higher body weight, my body burns more calories trying to do that activity. I don't know if its true or not, but I will probably look into it someday. 

So I'm excited to see the data I can use from this watch. It is definitely going to make this tech-geek/swimmer a very happy guy! 

As for my GoTheDistance, since this was the first swim of the year, my total is a whopping 1,600 yards for 2015. We'll see if I can get that 200 mile mark this year, finally!! 

-- the UberClydesdale