First Pool Swim in my "New" Garmin

I got my "new" Garmin a year ago at Christmas, but I've always just liked to use my "chrono" function on my cheap watch for tracking pool splits. But in my last swim, I tried out my Garmin for the first time.

A pre-sunrise swim in Cooke Hall. Three of the 6 lanes free. Sweet.

One big difference is that I can't just take normal "splits." When I want to take a split while running, I just hit a button. Same with biking. But in the pool, that same button tells it that I'm starting to take a rest. It's not "split, split, split, split" like in biking and running, but instead it's "split, rest, split, rest." So I can't just take my *own* splits every 100, but I can look up what it says are my 25 yard lengths after-the-fact. I learned that after a few hundred yards. Oops. Notice in my "pace" chart here that when I did a 200 warm up, I did 100 and tried to take a split which recorded no swimming for the next 100:

The gap is so big because when I took another split
after 200, it was tracking distance but that was my rest.

And then that big gap at the end was doing 300 yards of kick drills which it didn't count as "actual" swimming. But it shows my workout pretty well: part of a warm-up, 400, 2x200, 4x100, a longer break, 200, 2x100, 4x50, then those invisible kick drills followed by a 200 cool down.

My heart rate seems about right, except for how high it got in my cool down:

I don't believe that spike at the end.


"Strokes" seem about right: fewer strokes when I'm swimming faster.


"Swolf" is like efficiency, and lower is better.

Afterwards, I could see my 25 yard length splits. I need to see if there's a way I can see 100s DURING the workout because that'd be nice. But afterwards, I can see that my last 200 was 3:04 with 100s of 1:34.9 and 1:29.6. But I'm annoyed I had to do math to figure out anything but my first 100:

Also, because this watch has no clue that I've swam a stroke since my last triathlon earlier this summer (because I haven't been wearing it for swims), it thought that was a VERY taxing workout for me and recommended that I take over 2 days of rest:

Nope. If anything, a swim *IS* a rest day.

So I like the simplicity of my simple Timex watch's "chrono" function, and I found I even got a little confused what length I was on in the "longer" sets (like the 400 and 200s) when not having to take splits myself. So I'm not sure how much swimming I'd do with the Garmin this winter. Time will tell...