Do you really need an Activity Tracker for swimming?

“Without data you are just another opinion”. That was what was going round our main character’s head as he hung onto the lane rope at the side of the pool like a boxer on the ropes, trying to make use of the small amount of oxygen he had left in his lungs to remember a couple of numbers…

But let’s get back to the beginning of story, because it will be up to you to write the ending.

On Monday I will start swimming. Seriously.

This is one of those familiar stories about a person, like so many others, who stops taking his “hectic lifestyle” as an excuse and gives the right name to what, until now, has really stopped him from swimming regularly: laziness.

Having identified the enemy, defeating it was the easiest part: a ticket for 15 entrances to a swimming pool and pseudo-professional swimming kit to feel more confident: two new pairs of swimming briefs, a brand-new pair of goggles to look “tough” to everybody else swimming in his lane, a soft silicon swim cap and he was ready to go.

Wearing the right kit is vital for looking like you feel at home in the pool: right lads, I’m not going to be “eating your bubbles” – something which, of course, duly happened.

The first four weeks were extremely tough for our main character, who was forced to get all his rusty parts working again. But when, after a couple of months, he managed to “gain a bit of stamina” and perform at a decent level in the water, he began to enjoy all the miraculous benefits of swimming: the pains in his back gradually faded, this breathing was deeper, his allergies were not as bad, he slept more soundly and the layer of blubber he had put on over the last few winters gradually got thinner.

As he got used to his new found well-being, he gradually wanted more. And so, like Eddie Morra in Limitless, our man went off in search of NZT-48 and began reading up about how to improve, how to swim better and longer.

The problem

His feverish search suddenly came up against an obstacle: however simple the training our man planned to do, he still had to keep count of the number of laps, swim styles and even arm strokes. And, most importantly, he had to keep track of his progress week by week. Too complicated for somebody as absent-minded as our character, who, once every three times, would forget to pack his flip-flops for the shower….

The speed at which he had started feeling healthy after just four weeks kidded him into a “false rate improvement rate”, because from then on he struggled to make any progress at all or, at least, any noticeable progress. And so our man’s excitement about “feeling better” was gradually turning into the boredom of “just keeping up his fitness”.

But that was just the opinion of an amateur swimmer with no stamina, who could only get the feeling he had improved as he hung onto the lane ropes.

The solution?

Having always been technologically-minded, he inevitably turned to technology to find the answer. And so he began his online searches looking for technology that could measure the quantity and quality of his swimming.

After all, nowadays no respectable runner would be without an activity tracker, i.e. a device that records every single parameter useful for monitoring and improving your performance.

Unfortunately, the choice of activity tracker in world of swimming seems to be even more complicated and it is easy to get confused between “waterproof devices” and “devices designed for monitoring your swimming”.

What we need here are the real experts: you.

It will, indeed, be up to you to write the ending to this story, helping our main character (who, as you will already have guessed, is the writer of this article) search around and then make the right choice – which will be revealed in our next post.