47 Days Remaining Part 2 – Open Water Swim #2 with Hydro Tracker…So Cool!

Finally!

I finally got my Hydro Tracker GPS swim device to work. Actually, I think I finally figured out how to use it. There is not much to this little device. It just sits on my head connected to my goggles. It is small with just a few lights that blink so you have to have faith that it is working. I had much doubt after struggling to make it work, but I got it going.

I met up with the Swim Clinic out at Lake G for an open water swim. I had already ran and swam once today, but I figured I could use all the open water swim practice I can get my hands on. There was a nice turnout and it was a great night to swim. I put my wetsuit on backwards like an idiot so I had to take it off and put it on again making me one of the last to get in the water. Oh well!

This was nice practice to swim in the water for the QC Tri coming up in a few short weeks. I keep forgetting about this race. I need to focus on this race a little bit, but I am distracted by my 70.3 Racince race.

We started off swimming the basic course of the race stopping at each point along the way.

I hit the button on the back of my head and prayed that it worked or else I it might get chucked. It worked! Actually, the info it provides once plugged back into the computer is awesome.

Here is an example of the main screen you get for each workout you upload to the site. You can see that I did not swim too bad in terms of going straight. I am slowly figuring that out more and more. What I like about this is the exact distance, the time, and more importantly my pace. I can see here as my warm up lap that I was around 1:45 for a 100 m swim. I would like to be faster than this. However, my first time in open water like mentioned before I always feel so confined.

Here is another lap of our swim out to another point. This is helpful because I can see my time drop about 6 seconds per 100 m.

You can click View Details and get further data which is cool as well. For this swim I was able to find out the following

In total I swam 2167 yards in 40 minutes or so. Not too bad. We estimated that we were around 2000 so this was a good reminder that open water swimming is not exact science.

Now that I know how to use this device it is going to be my best friend. I love this data and it just gives me more data to crunch and look at.

I was tired after this swim. It was a lot of swimming for one day along with the run. Add to that the work we are trying to do around the house and it was no wonder I was ready for bed around 9.