First swimming gadget

Now I've started to be able to string some lengths together and reach a fair total I decided that I needed a gadget to log things! I considered the single minded Garmin Swim and Poolmate but thought that I didn't swim enough. Then I excluded the Suunto Ambit2 in its various guises and the Garmin Fenix2 largely on the basis of cost and that they make far too much of a statement for a beginning swimmer, although they'd be great to record and navigate long trail runs.

Images from the company's websites

A couple of reviews also mention that the automatic counters are quite sensitive to technique and as mine is poor and not very reproducible they seemed a bit risky. The low key solution was a simple waterproof counter from SportCount that's small enough to sit on a single finger.

From the website, the image doesn't show how small the counter is.

On its first use I only failed to trigger the length once and that was evident as that length had twice the duration of the adjacent ones. I also managed to retrieve total time and individual length data from it; features are accessed sequentially using the single button below the display. There are 3 models of counter with different features but the prices are so similar it made sense to get the top model.

On this occasion I copied the data by hand into a spreadsheet, I'm not sure if I'll do that every time but it felt as though I should start off that way! This revealed that my pace was a slow 03:43 minutes per 100m. Somehow at the Goodwin I need pauses between lengths, only of a few seconds, but there nonetheless, I think I find the rough water tiring.