Gill text me late last night to say she couldn’t make our run on Thursday morning, so I decided a lie in would be a good bet for me. 🙂 Although I’ve only run once this week, I’m thinking it might be good / sensible to give my foot a rest. I’ll maybe do 5 miles tomorrow morning to keep my legs turning over before our long walk on Saturday.
Last night I emailed Santa Claus asking if he might want to get me this, a:
Right now, they’re selling on Wiggle.co.uk for £87.99 (with my 12% discount)… and I thought it would be a good present for me. A bit steep, but a good thing to be bought as a treat. Any review I’ve read have said it’s a great piece of kit, counts your laps, strokes per length, speed etc (apart from the steep price).
I just need to choose between the black one or the blue one. Wiggle says it’s going to be out of stock of blue ones until about April, so I think the only choice is to get the black and red one.
Here’s a short video which sells it quite well:
And here’s a review of it:
While watches for swimmers are not new, it’s only recently they have become advanced enough to automatically count your laps (lengths) for you. Previously if you wanted a watch to work out how far you’d swum you would have to manually hit a button every time you got to the end of the pool – not exactly ideal. However, a few years ago Swimovate developed a new technology which used algorithms to sense a break in the stroke pattern every time you turn around in the water. It works with all four strokes (front crawl, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly) and with standard turns as well as tumble turns though it won’t work if you change your stroke half way through a length. The watch will also work on either the left or right hand. It is this technology that is incorporated in Swimovate’s range of Poolmate watches – available in pink, blue, black and grey for £69.99 online.
Essentially, the Speedo watch licenses Swimovate’s core technology and though the model is a little more expensive than Swimovate’s (the Aquacoach is currently retailing for £99) it does look a little nicer as well as feel a bit more chunky. Available in blue or red versions, it has a large flat digital display and four control buttons – two on each side of the watch. A green backlight is on board and the watch can be worn at depths of up to 100m.
Before you swim you need to set the length of the pool you are swimming in as well as your weight (it uses this to work out how many calories you have burned). Settings are in lbs and yards or kg and m and it will work with all pools over 15metres (most public pools are between 20m and 35m). Unfortunately, though, it can’t be used in open water to measure distance – for this you would need a watch with a built in GPS!
While the Aquacoach can be used just to work out the distance and time of your swim (simply by pressing the bottom left button at the start and end of your swim) keen swimmers may be interested in its additional functionality. This includes average speed (how many seconds it takes to swim 100m) and stroke count – how many strokes it takes to get from one side of the pool to the other (basically the lower the better). You can also measure individual ‘sets’ within each of the sessions.
However, it doesn’t have the ‘efficiency’ setting of Swimovate’s Poolmate which uses a clever little metric to work out how well you are swimming – maybe Speedo felt this was a little gimmicky or a bit crude.
No more counting lengths for me!! 😀
