A Revolutionary New Feature for Open Water Swimming - Introducing SwimStraight™
It’s race day. You’re prepared. You’ve hopefully slept a little bit the night before and you are now standing in the swim corral, waiting to start. Adrenaline and nerves are ramping up.
Maybe you did a little warm-up swim, or maybe you skipped it to stay warm. It tends to be a bit brisk and dark at 6 am
This is all the lead-up to a highly exciting open water start to the race that can quickly bring chaos of bodies, limbs, and splashing water, in all directions while you’re trying to stay calm and focused on your race. Keeping the nerves and effort in check is key to having a great start and making sure you’re managing your energy levels for the entire race.
Once you get started, it can be difficult to know you are swimming the best line possible to avoid wasting energy. Do you follow the pack in front of you? Do you just stick beside the person who appears to be swimming straight immediately to the left/right of you? Can you see the swim buoys? How often do you see them? Is it clear from so far away that you are keeping straight?
The open water nerves and confidence are a well-known concern for people, whether racing or not. The benefits of swimming straighter are huge - to keep on a safe/known swim path, to conserve energy, to save time, and to feel confident. In triathlon, the swim is often the leg that brings the most anxiety and people just want to get through it so they can perform on the bike and run.
There are many ways one can improve that feeling of confidence in the swim but possibly the top, and most requested, is a way to know if you are swimming in a straight line, or not.
We built SwimStraight™ just for that. SwimStraight is a new Premium feature that can be used on both our Smart Swim 1 and 2 goggles that delivers navigational feedback via our innovative digital compass that can be easily viewed and referenced in real-time in our goggles.
In the following video Brian Johns, Head of Coaching Science at FORM shares exactly how SwimStraight works and can benefit your open-water swimming.
Our top priority is to promote safe swimming in open water and there are many guidelines to make sure you are keeping yourself and others safe when swimming in open water, swimming with a group, maintaining visibility, knowing your swim area, etc. and also to keep a good sighting habit to see where you’re going.
SwimStraight works with all of these in mind and, especially with sightings, we want you to not only keep that habit but to improve it by working on it in your swim.
Same pace, better time
Incorporating a first-of-its-kind digital compass, SwimStraight enhances open-water swim confidence by enabling swimmers to follow an in-goggle directional heading. This reduces course deviations and improves overall swim efficiency.
No more zig-zagging in the water means conserving energy and shaving minutes off your time. SwimStraight reduces course deviations and improves overall swim efficiency.
On any open water swim, whether you use a watch or not, try turning on SwimStraight - we’re confident once you try it you won’t want to swim without it, especially if straight line swimming is a challenge for you.
The experience requires a short calibration and the goggles will guide you through it before swimming. This is to ensure the compass is adjusted to your local conditions anywhere around the world.
If you’ve already nailed straight line swimming in open water, no worries, you can keep this function disabled on your open-water swims.
Through our testing of this feature, we’ve received really great feedback and results. We’re excited to see how this new experience works for you!
Update: May 9th, 2024
Since launching this innovative new feature, we’ve been informed of great race usage stories, where SwimStraight has saved minutes when racing. Bryan Dunn, a Team Zoot athlete shared his experiences from his recent 70.3 races at Oceanside and St. George here.
We’d love to hear stories like Bryan’s and encourage you to share your SwimStraight race stories as a post in our FORM Swim Club!
