Garmin 910xt for swim
Quick opinion survey...when using your garmin 910xt for swimming (indoor pool), are you using the interval/lap to mark your sets? I haven't been, yet, but am contemplating it.
Does it really provide any benefit other than something else to distract me?
Does it really provide any benefit other than something else to distract me?
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Check out the Super Sweet Garmin Swim. It is relatively inexpensive and works sooo great. It has a rest interval function that is great. Just hit lap at the start and the end of each period of swimming and it will differentiate the rest intervals for you.
I have both a 910 and a Garmin Swim. My Garmin swim died (because it's a Garmin, and every Garmin product I've ever owned has had to be warrantied at least once) and I was using the 910 indoors for a few weeks.
It was ok, but definitely not nearly as good as the Garmin swim. The fact that there are no drill timers on the 910 was a pretty much instant deal breaker. That and it doesn't really understand the concept of rest intervals.
For it to be of best use, you have to hit the lap button at the beginning and the end of each interval within a set. I don't find this to be a burden, but if you do, no problem!
For example, you can take a look at this rather medicre swim of mine from today at an LCM pool: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/335949244 (I was really tired...stayed up way too late.)
This was 3 x 500, then 10 x 50 on the minute, then a 5th 500. But just to experiment, I didn't use the lap button on the 50s. I just took off for the next length on the minute. It breaks up the lengths all screwy and can't even tell that I really did them all 10 on the minute, within about 1 sec accuracy. It thinks each length plus rest was a much more varying amount of time, although it does get the overall distance right.
Contrast that workout to this one, in which I did a set of 100s, but clicked the lap button. Of course, you still don't get a super accurate time for such a short interval because it takes you a couple seconds to hit the button, but at least it's consistent, and gets everything as it should. http://connect.garmin.com/activity/334357029
So my take is that if you want to use it in the pool for regular workouts, you just have to learn to hit the lap button all the time.
(This said, I'm not sure what to do about the whole "drill" thing, or if it even matters, except if you're hung up about TSS of the workout. If you use a kickboard or do a sculling drill or anything like that, it won't register as you think it should. But if you use paddles or fins or a buoy that also makes you go faster, it will overestimate your TSS because of that, too...so the TSS part is just a complete balpark thing, unless you stick pretty much to straight swimming.)
What does everyone use for TSS Scores for swim? Since WKO+ allows manual overriding of TSS, I want to update them. 1 tss/minute? (I think I remember seeing that somewhere before).