I am really excited about the new Garmin 310xt. What I love about my 305s and PowerTap is the ability to record workouts to compare month to month and year to year. I seem to forget average speed from a year ago even though it is 99% of my thoughts for 3+ hours on the bike.
I have a ring swim counter that keeps laps speeds. I love it. But I have to manually record the times into a spreadsheet. Which I often forget to do. I am excited that with the 310xt I will be able to do this automatically. Sure it will need to be outside swims.
But how accurate do we think this will be? It is different than running. With swimming your hand is moving a lot further then running and you are going a lot slower. So it would seem like accuracy is going to be an issue. Like to hear others thoughts.
It is my understanding that the GPS signals can’t be received underwater, and that unless you wear the new Garmin under your swim cap you will not get distance recorded during the swim.
Planning on getting one but only planning to swim with it in races due to size and that most of my swimming is indoors. Probably won’t be accurate to the second which is what you ant in swimming…that said, have you been able to find one available for sale yet?
Have not found one available yet. The ability for my wattage and course to be available in one place will probably be worth it to me to buy.
I am curious what the software is going be like. It would be great to easily be able to graph wattage to %grade.
I also would really like to see some numbers of speed difference on hills using heavier disk versus no disc. Like to do this several times to get a feel of what hill climbing and the type of riding I do make weight better than aero.
It is not like I am that good this really matters but I love this stuff. I have an engineering type mind and love data, weight, aero, power and analysis.
i don’t see why it wouldn’t record during the swim. your arm moves in and out enough to still calculate it no problem. Not to mention it should read during some of the stroke within the water. I’ve used mine on my motorcycle in the inside pocket of a leather jacket and it still records it somehow.
That said… I’m more curious about stripping a wetsuit sleeve over the watch after the swim.
I am a 305 user and am very excited about 310xt. Being waterproof and ant+/power meter compatible is good enough for me. With quick release, I will able to swim with it, record time for the swim (I don’t need the speed of my swim), place it on the bike, use it with a power meter and finish with the run on my wrist again. One device where you can observe among many other things your total race time. All this is worth to me and will be getting one for sure.
As I understand, in the water, it will not be able to receive satelite signal. I could be wrong. To me, just being able to press Start at the swim start and than Lap for time out of the water is good enough. It will tell you weather you met your swim time goal during the race.
Above all, being able to use it with a power meter is huge to me. I have been waiting for Quarq and will most likely pull the trigger this fall, as well as 310XT with it. I wanted one device, do it all and I think we are getting it. Maybe not perfect at everything, but will do it for my level.
The other thing to think about for swimming is how accurate it will be at that speed. The slower you are going, the less accurate GPS is for speed and distance. There is some error in position acquisition. This gets smoothed when you are going fast (even at running speeds), but with the relatively slow rate of travel in the water, may goof you up.
We had a woman who would canoe along side our open water swim class - she brought someone’s Garmin watch with a couple of times and it was way off (even though she held a stright line right beside us)
Maybe new ones have less error, or maybe you can get it to record position less often - either would fix the problem.
i don’t see why it wouldn’t record during the swim. your arm moves in and out enough to still calculate it no problem. Not to mention it should read during some of the stroke within the water. I’ve used mine on my motorcycle in the inside pocket of a leather jacket and it still records it somehow.
That said… I’m more curious about stripping a wetsuit sleeve over the watch after the swim.
I imagine it take more time to reacquire and lock on to a lost signal than is available during the out-of-the-water portion of the stroke.
We may just have to try this in water to see the device behavior, since I think it will depend on how the device is programmed to behave when faced with brief (1-2 second?) signal attenuation or loss. If you have a signal prior to the start of swimming, then it’s not clear to me if the brief submersion of the arm in the water during the stroke (and the correspondingly brief but significant signal attenuation due to water submersion) will cause the device to respond as if the signal lock had been broken and needs to be re-acquired like it was starting over. I’ve had my FR 305 in a swim cap which was rhythmically submerged or not due to my swim stroke and I still got a distance reading, which suggests that a 310XT might still retain signal if worn on the wrist.
i don’t see why it wouldn’t record during the swim. your arm moves in and out enough to still calculate it no problem. Not to mention it should read during some of the stroke within the water. I’ve used mine on my motorcycle in the inside pocket of a leather jacket and it still records it somehow.
That said… I’m more curious about stripping a wetsuit sleeve over the watch after the swim.
I imagine it take more time to reacquire and lock on to a lost signal than is available during the out-of-the-water portion of the stroke.
Actually I don’t think it would take any time at all. I don’t believe the signal will be lost. GPS units, once “locked in” on satellites, remember those positions. So it will remember where it is every time it surfaces. It’s when it thinks its there, and it’s not does it take a while. That’s why they take longer to calibrate if you’ve moved some distance since last use.
I’ve used my 305 swimming once (since it died right after). But for that session it accurately recorded my open water swim, position, distance, pace. I think it died because some water got in and didn’t dry completely so when I plugged in the charger it fried.