Swim drills & confounding the Garmin 910XT

The Garmin 910XT measures your indoor swim training distance by counting the lengths you swim. You tell it how long the pool is and it does the maths. It can get confused if you change stroke mid-length or don’t swim normal strokes.

I tried it out with some sculling drills today and it was fine with front sculling and mid-sculling but it got a bit weird with back-sculling and added a couple of lengths. Not sure why. Maybe it would be fine in a 25m pool.

I had a look through the data from my 1000m TT swim & found a couple of things. Like I said, my stroke rate could do with improving so I had a crack at that. @thomiphillips has been trying to get me to up my stroke rate and cut out the dead spots in my stroke and he’s succeeded to a point, particularly with the TriLife training day over the winter. My tempo pace stroke rate was around 60spm, and it’s surprisingly hard to stroke faster. It feels like thrashing at the water and I only managed to get it up to 68spm, but I was only losing 1 stroke over 50m at that rate. It felt good though; more like a punchy open water stroke, like I really managed to cut out the front end dead spot, and you seem to breathe so much more!

End result: I swam the fastest 200m reps that I remember ever swimming in a 50m pool. I swim these things at this pace a lot, and these were a lot quicker for the same effort. Nice. That’s something to work on between now and Israel!