Zurich - Researching Swimming Watches

Garmin Forerunner 735 XT

In the end I decided I needed to replace the Suunto Ambit 3 swimming watch that I’d lost. Although I liked the Suunto, I could also conceive of there being a better option out there, so I went (yet again) on a research mission. Of course, as you read about different products, you like features from some, and other things from others, and no one watch has everything.

For the record (in case any swimming watch designers are reading this), after looking at almost everything, these are the features I most wanted:

• Track the following: number of lengths swum for varying pool sizes (25m, 50m), total distance, speed [pace], SWOLF (a swimming measurement of efficiency), number of strokes per minute. Most watches do all of this. 
• A buzzer that I could set to tell me when my desired distance was complete, so that I don’t have to stop and check while swimming; a buzzer to tell me if I was swimming too slowly. Both on the same swim would be good, but I don’t think any watch offered that and they’d need to program two different kinds of buzzers. 
• Ability to be used for open water swimming to measure my speed, distance, number of strokes, etc. I got very confused as to whether GPS or a velocimeter would measure this better, since I believe neither is perfectly reliable. 
• For open water swimming, I’d be really interested to know the temperature of the water. 
• A record of my personal bests (distance, speed, strokes per min, pace) over various distances and how this compares to various other populations (everyone, women of my age group, all women, men etc, and where I am in that overall range). I’d also like to see how my performance in this respect changes over time (if it does!). 
• Ability to track my progress – am I getting faster, swimming more efficiently, am I swimming further, how regularly am I managing to go swimming? 
• Preferably, the watch should be able to discern my stroke (crawl, breast stroke, etc). 
• Ability to sort my swims by lap length, open water swimming and also to tag my swims so that I can analyse those swims separately (eg, look at swims in 25m pools only; look at swims in sea water only, swims in a wetsuit, swims in lakes, swims where I do a proper turn, etc); preferably also compare some common ones (eg speed for certain lap lengths) to the general population. 
• Ability to show me metrics for each lap so that I can see if I have a dead phase during my swim (and whether the watch has misrecorded a few). 
•  Most importantly, the ability to view the data via my laptop; not be dependent on having a smart phone 

It wasn’t easy to find out some of this information in the specifications. Also, I looked at many reviews (eg, reviews of best swimming trackers in 2017) and some of these weren’t reliable. One overview claimed that a particular watch could be used for open water swimming, but when I looked up the user manual, it explicitly said that it wasn’t suitable. That was an important feature for me, so I had to be sure, since not having it was a deal breaker.

Many watches were multi-sport, so if I looked on amazon for reviews, I sometimes wasn’t sure whether the good reviews were from, eg, runners rather than swimmers. If I was lucky, “swimming” would be a filter I could use, but this wasn’t always the case. I was put off by the TomTom, which had great reviews, but the reviewers referred to it as a runner’s watch and both Janice (who I know from El Andalous) and one of the online reviewers recommended swimmers to buy a swimming-specific watch. Some people indicated that it may not be entirely accurate for swimming.

I almost bought the Swimovate Poolmate because of its buzzer option to alert you when you’d reached your goal, but when I read reviews, people seemed to think the buzz was so faint that you tended to miss it. The buzzer option only seemed to be on the Poolmate and Swimmo watches.

Swimmo was a crowd-funded watch that I may buy at some later point but for now I think it’s too early in the development phase. An open water update to the software is coming in August 2018, but reviews of the initially launched watch for pool swimming indicated that the first couple of versions hadn't even been properly waterproof. Others were complaining about lack of accuracy of counting the lengths, but there had been several upgrades since, so I suspect that might be fixed. Because it can be purchased only directly from the manufacturer, it was  difficult to find reviews that you knew hadn’t been hand-selected. In the end, the deal breaker was the inability to analyse the data via my laptop and they weren’t even planning that for the near future. It all had to be done on a smartphone or on the watch itself. Too small and fiddly for me!

I ended up with the Garmin Forerunner 735 XT. I was initially put off by the price (what if I lose it again!) and by the fact it was a multi-sport (and primarily running) watch. I’d have preferred a swimming-specific one. It has a heart-rate monitor but it doesn't work under water; however, I wasn't fussed about recording my heart rate, so that didn't matter.

What sold it to me were the good reviews on amazon – much better than reviews for any of the swimming-specific watches. Even swimmers seemed pleased enough. Another superficial part of my decision was that the design of the watch appealed to me much more than many of the others (including Suunto). I fell in love with the aqua colour! I guess this means that unwittingly the watch’s appearance was also a factor that I considered. And, not least, it had most of the features I wanted apart from buzzing me to tell me when my session was complete. I’ll report back on how it performs!