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OK....I admit it I love technology.  I can try and deny it but I can't.  I work for a technology company and I compete in a sport where everyone thinks techology will give them an edge.  Lighter shoes, power meters, carbon fiber bikes, deep dish carbon wheels, aero drink bottles, high tech fabric race suits, speedsuits for swimming, HR monitors, GPS gizmos and the list goes on.  I've bought most all of them.

Although lately I've tried to hold back on my technology purchases, aside from the fact I pretty much already own everything I've found that hard, smart training does more for you than any technology.  

However I did breakdown recently and purchase some new training technology.  A new watch...yep a watch...well a swim training watch.  Now how is this watch different from the literally 6 other watches that I have, well let me tell you.

This watch was created just for swimming.  It's really more of a swim computer than a watch (however it does tell time and I think it might have an alarm as well).  So what does it do.  

When you get ready to do a swim workout you simply hit start and swim, when you get done with your  interval (lets say 100 yards, it will allow you to set either yds or meters) you hit the start button again and it reads this as a pause (or rest) in the workout (you also need to do this when doing kick with the paddle board or breast stroke) and when you're ready to start your next interval you just hit start again.  Pretty cool huh?  Ahhh, now for the cool part.  The watch will capture how long your interval took (time split), number of lengths of the pool for the interval, yards or meters, your pace (pace/100), your average number of strokes per length and your efficiency (I haven't quite figured this one out yet).  Here's the crazy part it really works.

It uses an acelerometer to measure the strokes and that's about as far as I've gotten in understanding the technology but the damn thing is accurate.  I swam 4100 yds the other day, when I got done I went back to scroll through my intervals to log my workout and I found that it only logged 3800 yds.  Great it doesn't work, then I remembered I had done 200 yds of kick drills and 100 of breast stroke with the watch on pause (it doesn't count that yardage of the workout but does count the time in as part of the total time working out).  It really did work.  What I really love is the stroke count feature.  My average strokes per 25 yds is 9 strokes, no counting just swim.

I have only complaint is that it's very difficult to see the screen when swimming if you want to check splits in an interval (say your 100 split or 200 split in a 400), but I've found that most watches are difficult to see.  The other complaint is that when you finish your interval when you hit start to begin your rest period it doesn't display for a moment your lap split so getting real time splits is difficult. 

Otherwise it's totally cool.