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Vivoactive open water swim

ANDY-PIPER
over 4 years ago

Sorry if this has been answered before. 

I have a Vivoactive multisport watch and have an open water swim event this weekend. 

You can alter the pool length and then there is a custom setting. Am I right in thinking I can add the length of the swim in there to get an accurate time etc? 

Thanks 

andy 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    In theory that would work, but in practice it probably won't. It is going to give you straight-line distance whether you're off by 0 or 10 or 100, so the only thing that will be accurate is the time, not distance or SWOLF etc. You're asking the app to do something that it's not designed to do, and there are open-water apps out there, though I'm sorry I don't have enough experience to recommend one.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    No real good workaround. I've had moderate success putting watch in "walk" activity to get a measure of the distance.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    There is no solution to the problem that the GPS signal can't penetrate even shallow water. Even the high-end watches screw up a lot because the watch has to re-acquire your position while out of the water for less than a second during your recovery.

    My solution is to put the watch in my safety buoy, which includes a dry pouch, and track as a walk. The pouch gets squeezed flat when you inflate the buoy, pasting to watch to one side. The tracking seems to work perfectly and you can see some of your stats listed under "splits." Then, in Garmin Connect, you edit the activity to be "Open Water Swimming," changing the name to "Wicked cool pond swim," or whatever you like.

    The total distance is not automatically calculated, but you can get it from your splits. You don't get info about your strokes, which is too bad. Also, the calorie estimate is for walking, which is way low.

    Here's the funny thing: Each time I've done this, I've put the watch face such that it faces into the buoy, which means the pulse tracker is facing out into the water through the translucent vinyl. And, it reports a pulse! You could say that I'm taking the pulse of the water!

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I use the other setting down near the bottom of the choices. It worked in the last triathlon I did. It will give you distance and time and route drawn.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I use the other setting. It is near the bottom of the choices. It will give time distance and the map

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I use Swimming App Professional (it's free but you can pay if you really like it).  It does it's best to track distance with GPS but as mentioned by JThanTris, GPS just can't work while on your arm.  Their suggestion to put the watch in they're safety bouy is what I'll be doing in the future (the last swim I did this morning lost almost 900m due to GPS lag) and I use Garmins HR Tri so I'll still get my HR data.  I don't know why I have kept my watch on my wrist for swim at all after reading JThanTris's suggestion.