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Probably my favourite aspect of Triathlon training has been the open water swimming. Because I’m not a Channel Swim looney, this unfortunately means that the outdoor swim season is quite short in the UK. This in turn means the dread boredom of pool swimming. Aside from the unnatural lighting, chemical water and (shock) other people.. the thing that I don’t like is how easily I lose count of lengths.

Thankfully I got a Swimovate Poolmate as a Christmas gift. It’s been great. It automatically tracks my lengths, times them, keeps a history as well as counting strokes per length and giving a ‘efficiency’ score.

I have the ‘regular’ version rather than the ‘pro’. From what I can tell, this just means that it doesn’t do an automatic data transfer to a PC. I work on a Linux machine most of the time anyway, and I suspect there probably isn’t an app I could use for the pro version anyway. Plus I’m quite happy to hit the buttons and go through it’s training log and transfer the details into SportTracks manually anyway.

What I like is the faultless way it keeps track of my distance and times, as simply as pressing the start button. You then just hit start again if you’re doing any kind of training to introduce a recovery period, then start when you begin the next set. Hold down start to complete the activity.

Swimovate Poolmate

Pros,

• Nice and small. Looks like a regular ‘petrol station’ digitial watch. i.e. not massive like my 310XT
• Simple to use. Basically, designed for pool swimming – so no myriad of settings etc.
• Effective. Does exactly what it’s supposed to. No errors so far!

Minor niggles,

• I’d like the lap counter to be bigger – it’s the number I’m usually looking out for – but it uses the small digits on the display rather than the larger ones that are reserved for time
• Some of the button presses are a little unintuitive. When viewing an activity it’s quite easy to get a scary “Erase?” prompt up. I hold down start when I see that to back out quickly.
• The history log doesn’t include the individual rest periods, but does include their time in the overall time. So if you do the 5 reps of 400m @ 8 mins, with 30 second rests you only see 5 sets in the log, but a total time of 44 minutes. You’d then have to do the maths to work out your reset time looking at the log.

Overall though, I’d say it’s a great bit of kit…. I’d still rather be in the lake though.