I’ve seen this complaint before but I want to add to the data about this issue.
The only data that truely matters is time and distance. Come race day the only thing that actually matters is how far have you gone and what distance did you cover. No one cares about run tolerance, step speed loss etc if you can’t get the most basic function of one of the three main sports correct.
Also Garmin has removed functionality from the watches you used to be able to pre program open water swims workouts with rests etc. That functionality is now gone.
Back ground-I’ve swam for about a decade between 2 and 5 times a week. I have a pretty good intuitive sense of how fast I am going (within 5 seconds/100m anyway)
Secondly I get that there has to be some type of data smoothing. You’re working with data at 1hertz, with gps data that has a small error range(I believe around 1m) but one that is there along with speeds around 1m/s. I’d imagine that this leads to very messy data that needs to be smoothed
Every open water swim i do this year has a few weird bugs. The first 100m or so there’s a massive lag in the data. I’ll be swimming for a minute or so and look down and my watch will say I’ve only swam 20-30m before having massive jumps in distance relatively quickly.
Second bug is when I stop swimming. Today I did 4*100 warm up, then 3*1000 before cooling down. Each of my rests had relatively big distances.
- 10seconds-9m
- 10 seconds-7m
- 10 seconds-10m
- 10 seconds-9m
- 46 seconds-30m
- 45 seconds-29m
- 47 seconds-26m
If I had been moving around a m/second in still water I think I would be able to feel it. If I factor in the extra distance into my previous rep my paces make more sense. I think they’re still likely 2-3% slow. Although I haven’t swam in open water in month so maybe this is just me adjusting to not having walls again.
