TriDot Podcast Episode 256

Elevate Your Swim Experience with FORM Goggles

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Welcome to the TriDot podcast. Loads of swim goodness to discuss today as we’ll learn to get the most out of our pool swim sessions and the big announcement, kind of going hand in hand with this episode; TriDot training is now integrated with FORM Smart Swim goggles. We’ll talk all about the role that FORM goggles can play in helping you do your TriDot swim sessions correctly. So hot show today and our first guest joining us for this is Scott Dickens the director of business development at FORM. Scott was a member of the Canadian National Swim Team from 2002 to 2013 participating in the Athens and London Olympics. He is a 16 time National Champion and Canadian record holder. He has an MBA from Simon Fraser University and has been working with FORM for over four years now. Scott, welcome to the TriDot podcast!

Scott Dickens: Hey Andrew. Thanks for having me on. I’m really excited to be here today to talk about some great tips for training in the pool, but also this amazing new integration between TriDot and FORM.

Andrew: Yeah. Super pumped all the way around. All three of us on the show use our FORM goggles. Also joining us is Coach Dan Caskie. Dan is a triple threat from Summerville, South Carolina. He works as a physician’s assistant. He is TriDot’s director of community and he is a triathlon coach. Dan discovered triathlon during a health journey to lose 100 pounds and has been training with TriDot since signing up for his first tri in 2019. He is a USAT certified coach and a certified bike fitter as well as an enthusiastic FORM goggle user. Coach Dan, welcome back to the show!

Dan Caskie: Hey, excited to be here, dive in, and take a good look at these things.

Andrew: Well, I am Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always we'll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our swim based main set conversation, and then wind things down with our cool down. Lots of good stuff. Let’s get to it.

Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew: Some lap pools are so bad that you worry about catching a disease if you hop in the water, some are so beautiful you just have to snap a few pictures for Strava or Instagram before you dip into the water, and most others well, they’re fine. They’re just fine, standard pools. Scott, Dan what I want to know for our warm up question today, in your time as a swimmer, what is a lap pool experience that was either exceptionally bad or exceptionally good and you’re welcome to share both if you can do so efficiently. Dan Caskie, where have you swam my friend?

Dan: You know, I don’t love swimming in a pool.

Andrew: Okay.

Dan: So I do it and I’ve learned to do it, but I’m a YMCA member. So nationwide YMCA and I travel a lot. You guys probably know that. So I have experienced YMCA’s and let me just tell you, they are not all the same. I will give my– My worst experience though was winter time in an outdoor Y, they had a bubble on it which was amazing except the heater didn’t work. So Greenville, South Carolina, December with no heater in the pool and I did not know that before diving in. So that was my less than favorable pool swimming experience.

Andrew: Yeah, so YMCA can be good, bad, or ugly, or normal. Yeah. Totally makes sense. Scott, I imagine you’ve seen more pools than Dan and I combined. What’s your answer here?

Scott: Yeah, it’s a tough one to pinpoint. I’ll go with my worst; it stands out. It was at the PanAmerican Games. Beautiful pool actually, but PanAmerican Games in 2003 in the Dominican Republic.

Andrew: Okay.

Scott: They did not have a way to cool the pool. So opposite to Dan.

Dan: Ooo.

Scott: They were using ice blocks. There was like a big square where they would drop like half a chunk of ice in to try to cool the pool, but when it’s 100 degrees and humid outside, it’s tough. So the first couple of days we were swimming as easy as possible just to try to acclimatize to the heat and it was just gut wrenching. Like if you’ve swam in hot water and try to swim hard it does not go well. So that was like my least favorite. Along the lines of least favorite is the opposite end of the spectrum. If I’ve ever been in an extremely cold pool and try to train, it just doesn’t go well. I can’t warm up and you just don’t get the type of workout you’re looking for. But beautiful pools, I mean, that’s a tough one. I’ve been in so many nice pools around the world.

Andrew: Good for you Scott. Good for you. Love that.

Scott: My favorite spot to actually swim though is at the Kihei Aquatic Center or the Lahaina Aquatic Center in Maui. Fantastic pools. I love– We used to go there to train almost every February for three to four weeks and just get our butts kicked, but at least you’re in Hawaii. Just great memories of the sun coming up, looking at the mountains, and just being outdoors in Hawaii. So that’s– I’ve been in nicer pools, but that’s my favorite spot to swim.

Andrew: Real quickly, my two answers. My bad, kind of like Dan’s YMCA that we have local LA Fitnesses. LA Fitness big box gyms all over Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and I used to swim at one that was right across the street from my TV studio job and the pool was fine. It was standard. It was fine. I think they must have like changed what company was servicing the pool because all of a sudden, like overnight when I would go it was just murky and it was gross and I was questioning like should I continue to swim in this pool? I started noticing like just in my health, like I was getting shorter of breath just randomly and I started doing some reading. I thought there was something wrong with my health and I found out that certain levels of chlorine can lead to that. So I stopped swimming in that pool. I switched to a different pool and all of a sudden my breath was normal shortly after. My good answer, I’ll leave us on a good note, right?

Scott: Let’s do it.

Andrew: We’ve said a lot of gnarly pools today. My good note, when I traveled to do the half Ironman in New Zealand, my wife and I spent a couple days in Auckland and it just so happened, this was not intentional, it just so happened we booked like an apartment for a couple days that was right across the street from a swim center and it was just a nice swim center. Not exceptionally nice, but a cool feature of their pool is there was like a skylight over the top of it so it was like it had an indoor pool feel, but you had all this beautiful natural light coming in and as you’re looking up during your session you’re seeing the sun and not just like the concrete roof of a pool. So yeah. That was really nice. It was the only time I’ve really taken a picture of a facility and added it to my Strava post after doing that swim. So I’m going to give a shout out to that pool in downtown Auckland near the harbor. Hey, we’re going to throw this question out to our TriDot audience. Find my post asking you this very same question. It’s going to be on the I AM TriDot Facebook group and it’s going to be on the TriDot Community Hub, the podcast section specifically. Let us know, do you have a gnarly pool that you’ve swam at or avoided swimming at or do you have an exceptionally beautiful pool that you have fond memories of? Can’t wait to see what you, our audience has to say.

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

Andrew: As brands, TriDot and FORM both love technology, love triathletes, and love swimming so it just made sense for the two brands to work together so that TriDot swim workouts could appear inside of FORM goggles allowing athletes to harness the power of both company’s technology when they head to the pool. Now, Scott, at the time we’re recording this, very, very fortunately the 2024 Olympics are getting underway. By the time this episode airs, they’ll be in full swing so take us back just to your time as an Olympian. What was it like getting to swim for Team Canada and what is maybe a favorite memory or two from your experience in Athens and London?

Scott: That’s a great question. Two totally different experiences. One when I was just kind of coming onto the scene as a national swimmer, qualified at age 19, swam at the 2004 Olympics when I was 20 and I think you go in sometimes as a young or younger person in your career, like, I want to make the Olympic team. That’s like my goal, to go to the Olympics. You know, you have your eye set on that, but there’s a difference between going and competing and I was set on making the team. I was the underdog that year and I still had to drop like half a second in my 100 meter sprint. So that’s quite a bit and I managed to do that at the trials, come out on the top and make the team, but when I got to the Olympics I had never experienced something as big as the games with all the village, the tons of free stuff. There’s celebrities everywhere. There’s high-end athletes. It’s just, it’s something that you can easily get almost lost…

Andrew: Sure.

Scott: …in focus and overwhelmed and definitely kind of took me to a point where I was like, “Wow. This is so much fun.” and I forgot what we were there to do to the point where like, yeah I got distracted. But it was a great experience to kind of absorb what the Olympics was. Swam. I came 19th and got my best at age 19, 20, I think is a fantastic result and you know, then I kind of just experienced what the Olympics is about, watched my teammates and other sports. Went to see as many sports as possible. Walked in the closing ceremonies. Funny enough, I’ve actually never been to an opening ceremonies because my events…

Andrew: Okay.

Scott: …were the very next morning which kind of sucks…

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: …but it is what it is. In the opening ceremonies you’re on your feet for ten hours and…

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: …you don’t get home until like one in the morning. So the first Olympics was great, but the second eight years later; I missed 2008 by a tenth of a second so that was a hard pill to swallow, but when you– I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners out there that you know, when you miss something that you’ve trained so hard for for four years, there’s two options: You either get up and you learn or you give in and you know, all of a sudden you look on the glass is half full. Oh sorry– half empty type viewpoint and you don’t learn from your mistakes and I looked at it as like what happened? What did I do wrong? And it came down to a lot of my execution. It’s a great actually thing to talk about. It’s very much like TriDot. It’s about following adherence to a protocol, a prescription, to get the optimal result and what the coaches were telling me to do I was like, “I’ll just try harder. I’ll try harder. You want me to do eight 50s at this pace? I’ll do eight 50s at a better pace or I’ll do 20.”

Andrew: Wow.

Scott: It was just like you know, I was doing things that I thought the harder I worked the better result I was going to get so I focused less on technique. I was muscling everything and just trying to go as fast as possible, essentially being a dumb kid and I had lost sight of what I was good at in the past, which was listening to my coach and technique was my bread and butter. It was all the things that came full swing back to 2012 where it was all the protocol, we’re all about the execution. What was my strategy? Then going into London it wasn’t about making the team. It was about competing at the Olympics and kind of going towards my targets and when I made the Olympic team in 2012 they were looking up and it was like, “Yeah. I made the Olympic team. Cool.” That’s not my goal this year. My goal is to go to the Olympics and compete with the best in the world. You know, broke Canadian records, finaled, best times and– It’s funny enough at the Olympics,it’s such a high pressure event that only about 10 to 15 percent of athletes actually perform a best or a PB because…

Andrew: Wow.

Scott: …it’s so high demand. It’s about the competition verses about going and exceeding beyond your limits. So it’s kind of like Kona. A lot of people– like, we’ve seen world records be broken in Kona recently, but for the longest time it’s about the competition and playing the field and that’s what the Olympics is about. It’s about racing, but I was fortunate enough to drop like huge amounts of time, make the finals and that was kind of the best experience for me is that I focused on all the little pieces to get the best optimal performance and that really came down to having a routine from the moment you get to the pool all the way for, not even just the competition days, but on the training days. Like you show up, what’s your routine for warm up? What’s your routine for getting warm before getting in the pool? For weight training? For stretching? For physio? For chiro? For eating? Everything was so regimented, but that’s what led to my ability to perform on the daily. It was just like I had gone back to the ways of just like– I just need to train hard. It’s like, well that’s not going to get you results.

Andrew: Yeah. So really you went to two Olympics, but it’s really telling the tale of the differences between three Olympic training cycles and what you learned over those three cycles that led you from just experiencing your first games to making the final in your last games. So the finals, what? The best eight swimmers in that event make the final? What was that one heat, right, where you just have seconds, minutes, to experience that.

Scott: Oh, it’s insane.

Andrew: What was that moment like for you being in an Olympic final?

Scott: Umm, so the funny thing is, is that was the final for the 4 x 100 medley relay.

Andrew: Okay.

Scott: So like in the eight days of– The Olympics is 16 days, swimming is always the first 8 and my events, the 100 meter, 200 meter breaststroke, and medley relay, kind of all spread out. So I compete on the 100 meter breaststroke which was my best on the first day. I made it to the semis and didn’t quite progress to the final in that but, you know, dropped a full six tenths off my best time, broke a minute for the first time in Canadian history and this was my 50 meter long course. And 200 meter breaststroke qualified for semis, dropped almost two seconds off my time. So it was just an amazing experience to be able to just keep progressing and keep dropping these best times and getting these lifetime bests at the biggest stage in the world, but after the 200 I went to– I got my lactate so high two times in the morning and nights, I couldn’t recover and my body kind of almost– I think I got a bug as well.

Dan: Oh yeah.

Scott: There’s so many people in the village, but I lost like four or five pounds after the 200 breast and then I had like a few days to recover for the medley relay and you know, I was just trying to get to the pool to swim.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: But we put up an amazing time and made the final and my last kind of professional race was that race and funny enough it was on my 28th birthday. So a cool way to kind of go out.

Dan: Wow. That’s cool.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dan: I love the paradigm shift too, man. That mindset, that’s– if there’s ever a book about mindset means everything, there it is right there. You know, going to the Olympics and competing at the Olympics. I love that. Man, that’s cool.

Scott: Yeah, I mean if you look at kind of the pros that are competing, going to Kona. None of them actually probably worry about making Kona. It’s just like it’s part of the job. So it’s kind of that mind shift and leading into 2012, one of the things I did a lot was the, essentially the mental side of the training, working with sports psychologists and a lot of it was kind of going through every kind of possible scenario. Like what are you going to do when you get to the pool? Let’s say you race at 12:00 pm, mid day, for your heat, what time are you waking up? So it’s like you work backwards. Okay, you want to be at the pool two hours ahead of time. You want to be out of your warm up 45 minutes before the race. So it’s like, how long is your warm up going to take? How long is your routine on the deck going to take to get you warm, activated? What are you doing when you get to the pool? What are you doing at the cafeteria? What are you eating? What time are you waking up? Really everything. If it’s so regimented, nothing is going to really distract you. It’s like, oh I’ve got to do this now. I’ve got to do this now. So it’s kind of like you’re blurring everything else out that could distract you and take your mind away from what your goal is. Because at the end of the day when I got there, the pool is like every other pool I’ve swam in. It’s 50 meters long, there’s eight blocks. The difference is, it’s the Olympics and there’s a crowd of 10,000 people versus like 500 or 1,000 and it’s very much like what can you do to just block out– the only thing you see is your block, your lane, and that’s a lot of what I did and going through every possible scenario. Like, what if this goes wrong or this goes wrong? What are you going to do if you get out of your routine? Just bring yourself back. So it was almost like when I got there I had been through that exercise a thousand times and just had to do it.

Andrew: How cool for you to have that swim background, that passion for the sport of swimming, that much time spent in a pool, and then have the business savvy you have with your MBA and with that being the profession, the field you wanted to go into, to work for FORM goggles and a company who is just pioneering in the space of what technology can do to help triathletes and swimmers in the pool. Man how cool that must be for you. Just kind of for our athletes listening today, some of them I know are already wearing FORM goggles in their swims like Dan and I. Some of them have probably heard of the product, they’re familiar with it, but maybe don’t know that much. And some of them might be like “What’s FORM?” Maybe I’ve seen a logo, but I’m not familiar. Just kind of give everybody a general– we’ll get into some more specifics in a moment, but what’s an overview of FORM Smart Swim goggles and what they do for athletes?

Scott: Great question Andrew. So the FORM Smart Swim goggles, got them right here.

Andrew: Ooooo.

Scott: So not your regular, standard pair of goggles. Very, very advanced. The unique thing about FORM and what we’re trying to do is trying to elevate athletic performance in endurance sports using real time visual feedback and if you think about a triathlete for example opposed to someone like myself that swam for 23 years, age 6 to 28 and still swimming, you develop a feel for the water and that feel can take time and patience and dedication and a lot of triathletes get into the sport as an adult and don’t have that same background of hours and hours of feel and drills and learning the technique through time. So what FORM can do is help accelerate improvement the same way other technology would on your run or bike. True real time visual feedback and seeing your data in the goggle heads-up display that’s built right in. You can get an idea of what you’re doing whether it’s your pace, your distance, your time. Your heart rate now with the FORM Smart Swim 2 with integrated heart rate. Your splits at every single turn. Your stroke rate in real time. So stroke rate meaning the cadence of your arms. So think about your RPMs on the bike. It’s so important to understand your RPM as it relates to your power and that’s being used so much now. It’s such a great way to kind of think about it. It’s like if you know these metrics and you can see them while you are executing whether it's run, bike, or swim. In the pool you can start to understand where your efficiencies are, but also your inefficiencies and I think that’s one of the things we are trying to do with the heads-up display is that it’s not obstructive. You can see right through it so you kind of focus in, focus out. If you’ve ever been in a car that has a speedometer in the windshield you kind of like see it when you want to, but then you can like focus out. That’s very similar to these. It’s called augmented reality so you really absorb the technology when you want to. The cool thing about FORM and how we are bringing the swim data to the masses is that I think a lot of people understand some data in terms of like pace, time, and distance, but those are outcome metrics and when you think about metrics in biking like RPM, power, those are efficiency metrics and they are the one– That’s going to impact your time, your heart rate…

Andrew: It’s what you’re actually doing.

Scott: …as well as how fast you go.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s what you, the athlete, are doing.

Scott: Exactly.

Andrew: It’s the things you have control of.

Dan: What you can control.

Scott: So if you can learn these efficiency metrics like distance per stroke, stroke count, stroke rate, and how to use them and how they’re impacting your pace, you start to understand where your opportunities are. So if you cannot hold a stroke rate for a specific time block while you’re swimming and you can see that in the FORM goggles, something’s going on in your technique. So it tells a story and there’s so much more we built into the process in the FORM total, I would say, platform. It’s not just a product anymore. We have an app that allows you to get real time feedback on your technique. You get it in goggles. You get analysis in the app. We have different features to make your workout experience more enjoyable, similar to like your bike trainer and you’ve got ERG mode. Well, we have guided workouts and that’s kind of like what we’re going to get into today is like, how can you get your TriDot workout into the goggles. You can execute that to the highest level.

Andrew: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes because obviously on our side– I mean athletes know they get their TrainX score, right. So if I’m doing my bike ride, my bike workout, on ERG mode on a trainer it’s pretty easy to get a high TrainX score and it’s pretty easy to do the workout correctly. If I go run at a track, it’s pretty easy to hold the right paces for the right amount of time to nail my intervals and get a good score at the track. In the pool, historically for athletes, that’s been the hardest place to get a good TrainX score because you’re somewhat at the mercy of how well am I holding my paces in the middle of the pool where I can’t see what pace I’m actually holding. Well, FORM has changed all of that. I remember, Scott, the first time I put the goggles on. PTO Dallas, when PTO put on their PTO Dallas race in downtown Dallas, I went and did that race and one of the staff members at Precision Fuel and Hydration, he raced the open water swim event. It was a 1500 meter open water swim and he’s a stupid fast swimmer. His name is Chris Harris. Shout out to Chris Harris from PF&H. He won that race and his prize for winning that race was a pair of FORM Swim goggles. Well, it just so happened that the following two weeks, Chris was going to stay at my house to heat train in Dallas for Kona. So Chris and I went to the pool a couple times together, we ran a couple times together, he’s much faster than me at all three sports, but we’re in the pool and he’s trying out his new FORM Swim goggles for the first time, lets me borrow them for a few lengths of the pool and man! Like how wild for the first time ever after swimming thousands of laps just looking at a black line and hoping– You know, I’m going by feel. Am I doing the right pace or not and not knowing until you hit the wall. Man, it was super cool to be able to see all that data right there. Dan, the first time you put them on, I know you are a very tech forward guy. I hand picked you for this episode for that reason. You have used every iteration of FORM goggle. You’ve used FORM goggles in the pool. You’ve used them in open water. You’ve used them on race day. Take me back to your first time using the goggle. You know, you were an early adopter of them. What was that experience like for you? How did it change your ability to do your training sessions correctly?

Dan: Yeah, I’m the same kind of idea of wanting that data. I definitely am a nerd and love tech and if I was going to do this I needed to do it right. So I actually started with the Garmin Varia which was kind of the heads-up display that clips onto your glasses. I still use it. When they stopped making it I bought four of them so I would never have to not have it and I’m waiting for a good set of heads-up– I’m tempted to run with my FORM goggles, but anyway. So having that data was helpful. I’m somewhat of an adult onset swimmer, but I would typically blow up, go too hard, and get past that point of recovery and it happened in my first race and I really had to stop and I needed to say “I need to back off a little sooner.” So when I first got the goggles in, I put it on heart rate. Of course, that was when it was just the wrist and I was very curious and Polar was the next step, but having that data from a chest strap or what not of my heart rate, I could say “Okay, when I get to this point I have to back down because it’s going to keep climbing.” Heart rate is still a delayed metric and I was still learning. So that was a game– It literally allowed me to complete my first 70.3. I know I confidently wouldn’t have been able to make it without that. So it allowed me to go from being uncomfortable in a sprint to confident to finish a 70.3. That was kind of how big of a change it was for me.

Scott: Yeah and one of the other things I think is an eye opener to me and thinking about how this is going to– The reason why I wanted to be a part of FORM and the journey of that, there’s so much you don’t know about your swimming and I think that’s the biggest opportunity is that you think– Technology like our watches are amazing and they are good at capturing data in the pool, but there’s limitations. One, you can’t see it and there’s also the nuance of like manual button pressing which you don’t do the same way every single time because we’re humans and we’re just not robots. But, let’s say you’re doing a block. Let’s go 400 yards, 400 meters, in a 25 meter or 25 yard pool. You start your interval when you push off and then you stop that interval after 16 lengths. You get an average pace of the 400, you get a time, and you get a distance. But that doesn’t tell you anything other than what your time was, your average pace, your average stroke rate and the distance you went. There’s 16 lengths of data that can tell you a story. What was the time it took you to do every single length and if you were going to do a test and we did this like with a group of people, but do 400 meters and just try to swim the same speed and hold the same amount of strokes for every single length. Now let’s do them with FORM and see what the difference is and just focus on these two things every single time you turn. So by seeing the time it takes you to do every length, seeing the number of strokes you took for every single length, all of a sudden it’s like wow. Most people that are not using FORM are unaware that there is very much this type of environment if you don’t come from a swimming background, is that you’re going all over the place with your pace and time and speed taking probably 16, 20 strokes here, 23 strokes here. So if you think about it in terms of biking and power, it’s like if you were to be on a bike and you were not able to hold a specific zone or power output and you were jumping all over the place, you’re burning excess energy and that’s going to impact your run. So what FORM allows you to do is be aware of all those data points to start swimming more consistently. It’s going to make you faster and it’s going to give you the ability to– like you Dan– save the energy for where you’re going to need it later on. So they’re going to make you better through education and awareness.

Andrew: Yeah, and part of the education is, to your point Scott, it’s learning, it’s being able to see what’s actually happening in the pool.

Scott: Yeah.

Andrew: What’s actually happening between the walls as you go. For some folks they’re probably going to have some revelations in terms of their stroke rate or their stroke length. Some folks are going to have some revelations in terms of their head turn and how far or how little their head is turning from side to side as they go throughout. There’s all sorts of stuff we can see on the back end that tells a story of what happened in between those walls. Dan, did you have anything specific as you started training with the goggles that was kind of a lightbulb? Like, wow I didn't’ realize that was happening, or was it mainly it just really helped you hone in on your pacing?

Dan: Yeah, so a few things before Pool School and after. When we use the TriDot Pool School to learn that functional freestyle it really made a difference because now I’m like body positioning and I learned about the four sides of swimming. So what I learned beforehand was that I had a bad side. I wasn’t breathing the same way and my stroke rate was different if I just breathed on one side or another and when you get the report at the end of your workout, you kind of scroll through and look at your stroke rates and your time and stuff and I kept noticing that when I dug into it that one side was different and it had to do with how my head position and how I was breathing. So I learned all that and worked on different drills. So that was very insightful and now I can use it. Of course, now I turn it on and it gets the “How’s your head pitch? How’s your roll?” I still use the snorkel to warm up sometimes and it gets mad at me for that one.

Scott: Oh yeah.

Dan: I get that messaging, but I love that there’s like a little track and it says keep your head between these two things. The other thing is, my ADHD is crazy, right? So not that there’s anything else to look at but a black line. Now I’ve at least got some numbers to look at, a little pathway to look at. So for me, it helped me not think about how I can get out of this swim workout and it kind of kept me engaged in the moment if you will. Again, no sound. No music. You can’t hear your watch beep. That was another big thing I was going to mention is that the watch would beep at you if you’re in or out of zones or over time, but I can’t hear that. So having it in front of my face quite literally was super helpful. And the rest feature, I was taking forever resting. So that’s a big winner.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dan: Auto start and auto stop the rest. That was– That’s a big one.

Scott: Yeah you touched on a lot of key things Dan. I see a lot of athletes dread the pool because it’s boring and it’s a thing you do because you have to do. There’s a lot of variances of why FORM can make it– It makes it more enjoyable because of the data, but also swimming is a technical sport and if you want to get your pace to go down you think of the relationship with Pool School. You learn the four sides of swimming. You learn how to swim correctly. Technique is going to make you better and we have now the introduction of, like you said, head pitch and peak head roll. This is called HeadCoach and it’s part of the FORM platform is that it’s essentially in-goggle digital coaching to correct your technique in real time using communication so that you can keep the, you mentioned the range, or the dot that represents your head, between ranges. You’re correcting your head position and body position by just playing a game and it’s one of the most unique ways to improve not only your performance, but your ability to swim correctly and then also how that’s going to impact your pace and stroke rates and what not. So it’s really unique how you can leverage FORM from just a piece of technology to make you aware of how you’re swimming, but also correct a piece of swimming that is the most challenging which is kind of cool.

Andrew: So Scott, my very first introduction to FORM, we were in Kona together and our mutual friend, Andy Blow, from Precision Fuel and Hydration–

Scott: Great guy.

Andrew: Yeah great guy. Great guy. He obviously these days, former pro triathlete, he’s now– he races a lot of swim, run events, right? He doesn’t do triathlon any more. He does a lot of swim runs. He’s doing a lot of open water swimming and he just knows we’re in the tech space, you’re in the tech space. He’s like you guys should chat.

Scott: Yeah.

Andrew: And one thing he said to me about the goggles, he was like– and this was the first iteration of the goggle. This was over two years ago now. He was like, if I am on my way to the pool and I realized I’ve forgotten my FORM goggles, but I have my normal goggles in my pool bag, I will turn around every single time, go get my FORM goggles then go back to the pool. He goes, it’s at that point. Like I don’t want to do my workout, my session without them. They help me get more out of the session, makes it more enjoyable, all the things we’re talking about. So that was high praise from Andy from the beginning. Scott, when athletes, triathletes in particular and they get their hands on the goggles, they hop in the water, they’re not going to have their first workouts. I know you’ve demoed these goggles all over the world. What are you hearing from athletes when they do that first session for the first time with them on?

Scott: It’s kind of like the you don’t know what you don’t know, and wow, I thought they were going to be distracting, but you know, I can focus in, focus out. Then there’s the questions like are there any other data points I can see. You know, you can program the goggles similar to like how you program your watch and get different data fields of like what you want to see when you are performing. So you can see really anything you want from pace, stroke count, stroke rate, heart rate. It’s about when and where and what’s helpful for you. So once they understand like the breadth of like what the goggles can do for them they’re really excited to see how that can be introduced into their training and a lot of the feedback we get is like, similar to Andy. It’s like “I can’t swim without them because it gives me so much more insight to how I’m swimming, but it also makes it so much more enjoyable because I’m not just staring at a black line.” You know, to me, like when I swim now I usually swim on my own and I grew up swimming in a group and a squad and I love swimming with teammates. It makes it super fun. I push myself to the extremes and the workout goes by fast. But when I started swimming on my own without FORM, like this was years ago, I found myself just kind of swimming up and back aimlessly doing the same kind of structured workout all the time and I never really would try that hard just because I was kind of bored. Then when I started to use the goggles I was like, oh wow. This is bringing me the data points I really craved like a split with every single turn, stroke counts, and just having that personalized feedback for me. Then when we introduced the structured workout I started to feel like I had a coach in my eye.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: It was like, okay. Doing like ten 100s and every time I’d finish one it gives me my time, counts down the lengths within the 100, tells me how many I’ve done out of ten. It’s just like, how does it know that I’m doing this? Then all of a sudden it spits out the next set for me, what to do, how hard to try. My adherence to follow the workout went way up and I started to have a really good time just because I felt like I did have this digital coach there with me. It’s wild how simple. I 100% compare it to like the first time I tried ERG mode on my trainer. I was like “This is wild!” and I loved it.

Andrew: Yeah and when we were in Kona together we also met the founder, CEO, Dan. Really great guy. Also a very successful swimmer in his background is a triathlete. I believe he did Ironman Texas a few years ago. Is that correct?

Scott: He’s done Texas and he also did Kona in 2019 as part of the CAF, Challenged Athlete Foundation. That was his– actually, funny enough, it was his first Ironman and he had a little, few things that he did wrong based on some of the things he had read. He tried to get ahead of dehydration and he was taking some salt pills which some people do, but he took too many and his body wouldn’t absorb the liquid. I remember he got off the bike and he was running and all he could feel was like just this bucket of water splishing and splashing around in his stomach and he was like, “This is brutal.” He totally got sick and you know, ended up still finishing the race, but he was like it was awful. Bad strategy. Should have worked with a nutritionist a little bit more and put a little bit more research into like this is my weight, this is how much– This is what I should be doing similar to what Precision does so well. We actually had the team from Precision come to the office and do sweat tests with all of us. It was so fun.

Andrew: Yeah. Yep, no we love those guys. They’ve been at a number of our ambassador camps testing athletes and definitely love them. But meeting your CEO and just hearing his triathlon stories, it was so cool to hear that he is in the space as your team is developing new features, rolling out new features, triathletes are at the forefront of your mind. What’s kind of the origin story of FORM and how did he develop the tech that became the goggles we know today?

Scott: So this is like a pretty funny, kind of unique story. He thought of the idea in 2009 during his MBA entrepreneurial project at the University of British Columbia. So he’s like, you know, I have a background in swimming. He was a distance swimmer so spent a lot of time staring at a black line, laps and laps and laps and he was like, “Wouldn’t it be great to just like see what I would be able to see when I run?” Like get everything when I want it versus having to like– There’s pool clocks all over the place and you do a turn and often what swimmers do is like we do a turn, we come up and then you look to the side at the clock and you’re like okay I did three or four dolphin kicks and came up at 5 meters. I need to probably, or underwater for like–

Andrew: You’re doing math constantly. Yeah more math than you want to do.

Scott: All the time and you’re counting your strokes. It’s just like an overload of mental capacity.

Andrew: What time was my send off? Like, what’s?

Scott: Totally. So he was like I would love to have that there. So after he finished his MBA and apparently he said he remembers doing the kind of like case study. I was at UBC training and they used our team as guinea pigs to interview us. They were like, wouldn’t it be nice to have this. We were like, yeah I guess so. But he was like I remember you were in the room because I remember your build and your tattoo. So funny enough, our paths crossed back in 2009.

Dan: Awww.

Scott: Yeah. But, so they started with the technology, him and his MBA group, they were like, we should do this, but given technology in 2009 was not where near small enough or advanced enough to put in a goggle, they started with ski and snowboard goggles and developed Recon and then they developed Recon Jet which were running and cycling glasses and in 2015 Intel purchased and acquired Recon Jet.

Andrew: Oh wow.

Scott: Unfortunately Intel didn’t keep the technology alive. It didn’t keep pursuing the goals of like what he wanted to do, but after his required time that he had to stay with Intel, he left with his core group of engineers and started FORM in 2016 with the goal of bringing what we have now to life.

Andrew: So cool.

Scott: So we launched in 2019 with our first sku and just recently this year in April we launched the Smart Swim 2 that has a more advanced kind of build with more hydrodynamics, smaller technology package, better components and integrated heart rate.

Andrew: Yeah and let’s talk about this a little bit Scott, because one of the new features in those that is so key for triathletes is the SwimStraight feature where you can now get in open water and have your…

Dan: It’s cheating.

Andrew: …FORM goggles tell you which direction you’re swimming. Are you headed straight towards that next swim buoy or are you drifting? Talk about that feature and just in the newest set of goggles that are out, what are some of the other features– We’ve talked about a lot of the training features, right, some things you’ll see in the pool.

Scott: Yeah, yeah

Andrew: But really unpack like what’s here for a triathlete in this newest goggle?

Scott: So both goggles are still on the market. We have the Smart Swim 1 and the Smart Swim 2. They both leverage the same technology, augmented reality. They both have the same sensors. The difference between 1 and 2 is the upgraded fit and industrial components. The new eye seals we designed. It helps to be more form fitting around the eye. There’s integrated heart rate which would be the biggest upgrade and the technology package on the side is a lot smaller so they’re more hydrodynamic. Newer straps just to be more on brand, but the feature of SwimStraight is actually available in both because they both have a magnetometer and that’s what we used to develop this. It’s an in goggle compass. So if you have a phone, you have a compass on your phone and when you turn this around, the numbers change. So you get a number of bearings and based on where you’re standing and where magnetic north is it will give you a bearing. It’s not locking in on anything because it’s a compas. So the compass in the goggle is not leveraging GPS. It’s leveraging magnetic signals and fields and that’s why there’s like the calebration steps so you’re locking in and calebrating  your goggles to where you are so we can understand based on the magnetometer which way is magnetic north and that’s how it’s going to work. So when you get in the water, the compass moves as you move and you  see different numbers and bearing headings based on the direction you’re looking. So if you were in an open water lake or ocean, you see a buoy or a landmark and you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got to swim to that.” Well, line up the buoy and look at it and you’ll see a bearing, a number. All you’ve got to do is remember that number and then as you put your head down and start swimming, keep the arrow pointed to that number similar to the compass and you’re going to be swimming straight as an arrow. So the key to both this is that in any given open water race there’s currents, there’s wind…

Andrew: Oh yeah.

Scott: …there’s people you’re following, there could be swells and that can all push you off course and there’s no black line to guide you. So this is now– It’s race approved, you can use it, and let’s say you’re swimming a half Ironman. It’s roughly 1900 meters or 2000 meters. So let’s use someone's pace of like two minutes per hundred. Just a simple, easy calculation. On average a triathlete swims 10% or more distance than necessary in a race just because they’re going off course. So if you swim an extra 100 meters or 200 meters, that’s two to four minutes of extra swim time that you’re doing. You don’t even have to swim the same– You can swim the same pace, not even get faster, and use FORM in a race and you’ll get to transition faster. What’s the most emotional connection with anyone to race? I want to go PB. I want to get to my transition faster.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: I want to– So it’s like if you want to go to those personal bests and get the best swim of your life, it’s going to– Like, we’ve had numbers of stories come our way in the last four months of people sending us like screenshots of like this is my map last year without using SwimStraight and this is my map this year during this race course while swimming with SwimStraight. I went a minute and a half faster. I swam straight as an arrow and I had the best swim of my life. It’s like, those are emotional stories that you just can’t replicate. So it’s been so fun and I loved testing this feature since we started it and it’s just a game changer.

Andrew: My personal best at a half Ironman is 5:02:30 and Scott, my next goal in the sport once I get back to racing as fast as I can; I’m kind of on a hiatus hanging out with my fairly newborn baby. But when I get back to racing my next goal is to go sub 5 at a half.

Scott: Yeah.

Andrew: And I remember when I went 5:02 I was pretty pleased with my bike. I was plenty pleased with my run. I’m looking at my swim going, man, I’ve got to figure how to knock three minutes off my swim because that’s the lowest hanging fruit here. TriDot Pool School is going to help with that because I still haven’t been through TriDot Pool School. Excited to get on board with one of those, but between that and SwimStraight, it sounds like I could do a PB tomorrow right?

Dan: Money in the bank.

Scott: That’s the thing. Like, you know, you spend tons of money on a wheel to gain a little bit more aerodynamics.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: But for something that’s going to teach you how to swim and allow you to swim better in your race, it’s a fraction of the cost and it can just provide so much value. You know, I love your guys’ philosophy at Pool School and what you guys do and it’s so about the feel. Swimming is feel and technique and when you learn that, it’s going to change the way you swim and it’s going to drop that pace or your ability to swim the same pace, but easier and the great way if you are a FORM user after you do your Pool School, you can then take your learning and use the technology and data to keep doing what you’re doing.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: And that’s the easiest part. Like, you’re not always going to have a coach on deck, but if you remember some of your paces and your data points or your stroke count, you can leverage that post Pool School and that’s what I love about it and that’s what I love about how I train right now. I remember the things I did as an athlete and with my coaches and specific stroke counts and drills and I use the data to remind me that I’m either doing it well or poorly and often I have to come back to the drills to make sure I’m doing things correctly.

Andrew: So I personally need to get my hands on the latest model so that I can try SwimStraight. Dan, you have raced with SwimStraight is that correct?

Dan: Yep.

Andrew: What was that feature like for you? Was it a game changer?

Dan: I was waiting to get– Like when you accidentally leave your AirPods on or something when you’re racing, you know, they’re going to pull you out. I’m like, there’s no way this is legal. I mean. You’re in– I first practiced it at the ocean, right? So I live here in South Carolina. We headed out to the beach and I’m like, yep let’s do it and you’re doing the waves and you know, my classic Garmin split is all over the place and I went straight and came back and now it’s like– I mean, it’s completely amazing. Again, gamification portion of it as well and then I love open water swimming in the lake. We spend a lot of time there camping and I just did that this July and basically I would say my favorite lap pool now is outdoor swimming with SwimStraight because you can just go from point to point and back and just be so dialed in. The currents there, you’re left hand strong, your right arm– You know, there’s so much more. The other thing specifically for Dan Caskie is that, and I think other people experience this too, the success of– If my head’s in the right position I swim so much better and I want to sight. I want to keep my head above water so much, that I can now increase that sighting distance, how many times I’m going to come out of that position.

Andrew: Wow.

Dan: And that additionally provided me with the confidence to say, okay, I’m on track. I don’t have to look up as much. Because you don’t want to be the guy who’s out here with the lifeguard going “Hey, hey! That way!” So that’s been a big benefit that I’ve seen in it. I think the confidence builder, again you’re looking down, there’s nothing to look at. In orientation we talk about this as well. If my fastest is straight ahead, straight flat, right? If you don’t know where up, down, you know, you’ve got to lock your head in. By locking your head in and not having to look, then SwimStraight, you can then pivot yourself. There’s probably like a yaw word or something that’s on that angle, but you know how to turn yourself a little bit. I mean, it just feels faster. It still feels like cheating.

Scott: It’s uh, I don’t like swimming in open water depending really where my environment is. I like swimming open water in Kona because I can see everything.

Andrew: Yeah, sure.

Scott: You know, you get the clear, beautiful. But in a dark environment like a lake I get anxiety because I’m so used to swimming in a pool. The technology calms me because it just allows me to focus.

Andrew: That’s a  great point Scott. That’s a really great point.

Dan: It gives you something to look at in the water.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. A lot of people are scared of swimming in the open water whether it’s lake or ocean because of like the unknown. The abyss of like what’s below me and it can easily take over your mindset increasing heart rate, increasing anxiety. Well, if you just have something to focus on even if it’s as simple as a compass or your heart rate or your stroke rate or your time.

Dan: Distance.

Scott: Distance. It’s insane. It’s like the most powerful– You put actually like relevance to an open water swim versus where you’re just kind of swimming the line.

Andrew: So last thing we’ve got to talk about here before we shut down the main set. We’ve got to talk about what it’s like to do a TriDot workout with these goggles on.

Scott: Yeah.

Andrew: Part of TriDot training, the way the algorithms work, there are almost 100,000 different variations of swim workouts that you as an athlete could be given by TriDot on any given day. In the past, what TriDot athletes have done is they go into the workout builder, the FORM app has a workout builder, and you just build your TriDot workout by hand and it’s not hard. It’s easy to do, but if you can not have to do that, all the better. So anyway, for a TriDot athlete, when they push their workout to the goggle, head down to the pool, hop in, what are they going to see as they’re going through the workout?

Scott: So first of all if you’re a FORM user and a TriDot user, just go into the app and under your profile settings you can link your TriDot account and then now that you have that in the app, your TriDot account and your FORM account are linked and what will happen when we launch this on August 7, is that we will essentially look for your workouts in your TriDot account and every six hours, we will try to pull if there is a swim workout and you can manually refresh it as well.

Andrew: Okay.

Scott: So you can open it up, hit refresh, and it’s going to pull that workout from the TriDot platform into the FORM app. Then as a FORM user, TriDot user, you go into an area in the app called My Imports and you’ll see your TriDot workouts. Then there’s a step where it’s like, okay, this is what the workout looks like over here in TriDot, this is what it came over as in format. I just do a little simple review then I hit “Save to Goggles.” Goggles are nearby, it sends the workout to the goggles and then you’re essentially, a lot of other people like, you know, you have a piece of paper, you go to the pool and stick it on a whiteboard or put it in a plastic bag. The workout on your goggles eliminates that.

Andrew: Yeah.

Scott: So it tells you your warmup, do a 200 freestyle.

Andrew: I’m a plastic bag guy. Yeah. I’ve always been a plastic bag guy.

Scott: Yeah. It tells you what to do, when to do it, how many repeats, when to rest, when to go, how hard to try, at what intensity. It counts down your interval distance as you’re swimming. It’s fool proof. It’s like what we were talking about earlier. It’s ERG mode of swimming and it does it all through automation so you don’t have to press buttons. It knows when you push off. It knows when you’re resting. It knows what stroke type you’re doing. Calculates all the data and even counts your repeats and serves up the next total set for you. It’s like– It’s wild and I still don’t know how we at FORM, the engineers, were even able to do that. So if you want the most seamless TriDot workout experience, link your accounts, send it to FORM, but then you’re getting that score protocol adherence and you’re probably going to optimize your TriDot plan because you’re going to finish with a higher score so that your next workout should be in line with what the plan is probably trying to do for you.

Andrew: Yep, nope. Absolutely right Scott. Absolutely right. Your understanding of TriDot is spot on. With all the times we’ve chatted about each company’s tech. So I’m super excited about this and I know a lot of our athletes are. A lot of our athletes will have already noticed, Scott, that the connection between TriDot and FORM has existed and so data has been going back and forth between both parties. So just to clarify for our athletes that have already made an account connection, so far data has been flowing from the goggle to TriDot and now the difference we’re talking about here is now your workout can go from TriDot to FORM. That’s what’s new here, correct?

Scott: Yep, the dual integration so it’s not just a push of the data to TriDot. If you’ve done the custom workout build like you said, we’re going to take the workout, you’re going to swim the workout and then the data is going to go back. So full circle and so if you are a TriDot user one thing you’ll have to do when we do the launch it’s an app software update. So do a refresh of your FORM app and update that on August 7 and then there’s probably going to be a firmware update on the actual goggles just like any other technology. So make sure you do those updates and then everything will come over seamlessly.

Andrew: Dan, you excited about it?

Dan: I am. I mean, I think this is like strapping a smart trainer on, you know what I mean? And getting– As we’re pushing to Garmin where I now just go find my workout, it’s going to be that simple, right. I just make sure I sync my phone beforehand. I’m excited about it. I also think, number one, we’re going to see a lot more narwhales. We’re going to see people hitting their scores, but we’re also going to see some swim split improvements over the next season because again, you do three or four sets and you don’t know what’s going to happen. Now you’re going to get real time data. You’re not going to cheat it with pausing when you shouldn’t pause like you do with your watch now. I think we’re going to get– because data– garbage in, garbage out. So you’re going to get better data in, to improve the training you do, which will give you better training to do, which will give you better results. So yeah. I’m over the moon as they say.

Andrew: So Scott, again a lot of our TriDot athletes already have the goggles, already have an account, it’s just a matter of linking them, updating, whatever. For any athlete that’s listening to this talk and has just really appreciated your insight on swimming, they’re intrigued by just the connection that can be made here in the technology, the ability to do the TriDot workout in the goggles and learn about their form just in general while swimming in FORM goggles, how can they best get hooked up with a pair of goggles? What’s the workflow here for becoming a TriDot and FORM user instead of just being a TriDot user?

Scott: The best way to check out FORM and learn a little bit more about the total FORM experience, the FORM platform is to go to formswim.com. We sell the goggles all over. So we can ship it directly to you if you buy them on the website. But if you’re ever interested in seeing the goggles, a lot of people like to look, touch, and feel, we also have a store dealer locator on our website where it showcases all of the locations where we sell FORM and all those stores have demo pairs. So if you ever wanted to go in and just see a pair, you can also do that. So there’s different ways you can get the product, but easiest would be formswim.com. You can learn, purchase, and it’s a great avenue.

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.

Andrew: So Vanessa Ronksley usually hosts the cooldown of our shows and as you know if you’re a regular listener, we always end the show with a Coach Cooldown Tip of the Week. So no matter what we’ve talked about you leave every episode with a tangible swim, bike, run tip from a coach. I’m going to hijack the cooldown today and keep it for myself while I’ve got Scott and Dan on. Full disclosure– as a part of our episode I asked Scott to come to the show with just six swim tips. Like six tips for how to get the most out of your swim workout when you go down to the pool. You know, things beyond using your TriDot workout and using your FORM goggles. Like actual swim tips and we talked so much about the Olympics which I really enjoyed, Scott, that part of our conversation today. That was so unscripted that we didn’t get to those six tips and we’re probably going to have to rebrand and rename what we thought we were going to name this show and that’s totally good. So let’s end today, Scott, with you just cherry picking one of your six tips. Leave us today with one way when we head to the pool that we can help get the most out of that pool session.

Scott: When you go to the pool have a plan because there’s nothing worse than just swimming like up and down. Because, you know, kind of like going for a run and just running. You mentioned the track earlier Andrew. You go and do like a structured run workouts, you’re going to get a lot more out of it similar to like a bike workout. So have a plan. Do sets and intervals. You’re going to get a lot more of a better outcome because you’re going to swim at different intensities, you’re going to do ranges of size of intervals and sets and then change it up by adding some equipment. It’s like adding resistance training with paddles and what not and that’s going to really just help you work on different elements of your overall swimming abilities. But at the end of the day, just have fun. The structure, equipment, drills to work on your technique, have fun.

Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew. For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Ready to optimize your training? Head to tridot.com and start your free trial today! TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.

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