It's the week of the walking dead. You know what we're talking about, the space between Christmas and New Year's, when you're so disgusted with your gluttony that you've promised yourself you'll sweat until you bleed. Well, the fact is swimming is like running with a risk of drowning a great way to get in shape, and Finis has everything you need to get in gear.
Sure, they have goggles, caps, waterproof MP3 players, even a snorkel that's centered on your head. SheFlogger calls it a dorkle and refuses to be seen with me while I'm wearing it. But even she, past captain of the swim team, has to be impressed with the Swimsense, a watch-style swimming performance monitor that tells you how efficiently – or not! – you're making headway.
The Swimsense is a light and unobtrusive unit that records time, pace, distance, stroke count and rate, calories and distance-per-stroke. Voodoo technology actually senses stroke type so you can get SWOLF efficiency scores for backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly and freestyle. The Swimsense even auto-detects laps. You can upload data to an online training log (USB dock included), set custom pool and swimmer parameters, really go crazy. The only thing is doesn't come with is a bumper sticker that says, "My Swimsense is smarter than your honor student." Which it should because it is.
There is room for improvement: occasionally laps are missed and strokes misidentified, and the user interface and online training log are a bit clunky, but Finis keeps updating the software and the Swimsense keeps improving. Bottom line: the Finis Swimsense is a great training partner.