Almost a year ago, I started using my Ionic to track my swims. In the early days, it was great: being able to track my progress motivated me and pushed me to go swimming 4-5 times/week. But, it became boring after a month or so. Just being able to see my analytics became less interesting with each swim. The unfortunate result? I went less & less often to the pool 😞
I also started noticing the thoughts that were going through my head when doing laps. They went something along the lines of: "How much time have I been swimming? How much more?", "How many laps remain?", "What will I be eating after this? :P".
I said to myself: "how can I make this more enjoyable? How can I eliminate those distracting thoughts and just focus on swimming?". I'm a coder so I hacked together a super simple (and buggy) app which gave me short and random challenges (e.g. "do 100m @ 1'55''", "take a break @ 30''") + would vibrate when each lap should've been completed. I wasn't expecting much but strangely enough, it completely changed my exercise! The distractions disappeared; the only thought passing through my head was: "I need to reach the end of the pool before my Ionic vibrates!". Also, the challenges kept coming and I just couldn't stop - it became addictive! My swim time/session jumped from 20-30min to 50-60min and from 1-2 times/week to 5-6 times/week!
I found this very surprising and counter-intuitive. I'm curious to see if other people have had similar experiences and/or share the same problems ("am I the weird one or are there others out there?!"). PM me or reply to this thread if so. I'd like to start a community of like-minded people who want to make our swimming sessions more enjoyable.
