Field notes 4 MIN READ
An open-water swim makes a strange, good line
No roads, no paths, and a swimmer who cannot see where they are going. The result is the least infrastructural drawing in endurance sport.
Swimming produces the most distinctive route drawings of any sport we print, and almost nobody asks for them.
No infrastructure
Every land-based route inherits something. A run follows pavements, a ride follows roads, a walk follows paths. The underlying network shapes the line before you make a single decision.
Open water has none of that. There is a start, some buoys or a headland, and a swimmer sighting every few strokes.
The line that comes out is the only one in endurance sport that was drawn entirely by a person rather than partly by a planning department.
The wobble is the point
Sighting is hard. You lift your head every six or nine strokes, see a buoy or a building or nothing at all because of chop, and correct.
Between sights you drift. Currents push you sideways, a stronger arm turns you gradually, and in a swell you cannot see anything for stretches at a time.
The recorded track wanders visibly. On a 2 km crossing the drift can be tens of metres either side of the straight line, in slow arcs.
Every swimmer's first reaction to seeing this is embarrassment. It is worth resisting: that line is a record of a person navigating a body of water by lifting their head occasionally, and the tidy version would be a picture of a buoy course rather than of a swim.
How the recording works
A watch cannot get a GPS fix underwater. It takes one each time your wrist comes out during the recovery phase.
So the track is a series of samples, roughly once per stroke cycle, each taken in a fraction of a second with the arm in motion. That is noisier than a run and it means open-water distances tend to read slightly long.
What to print
The route, large, with distance and elapsed time. Skip pace — open-water pace is mostly a report on the current.
Dark stock suits swimming better than anything else we print. A pale line on near-black is the closest a poster gets to the actual experience.
Questions people actually ask
- Does a watch record GPS while swimming?
- Yes, when the wrist is out of the water. The watch takes a fix each time your arm recovers, so the track is a series of samples rather than a continuous line.
- Why is my swim line so wobbly?
- Because you were. Sighting in open water is difficult and every swimmer drifts. The wobble is the most honest thing on the print.
- Do pool swims work?
- No. A pool swim has no GPS — lengths are counted by the motion sensor — and a 25 m line is not a print.
- Is the distance accurate?
- Roughly. Sampling once per stroke cycle with the arm in the air is noisier than a run, so open-water distances are usually a little generous.
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