Kaszuby, August 2026: Another Real Group Test of the Vimo Tempo Trainer

This camp was different from the others. Not because it was the first test: we have run a good many of those over the past three years. This time there were more than a dozen devices in the water at once, and every swimmer had one of their own. Not in the office, not during a single training session, and not in lab conditions, but with real swimmers in real camp conditions. That is probably why it mattered so much to me.

It ran from August 6 to 9 across three Kaszuby lakes, the second camp of the season after the July edition. Vimo Swim was a co-organiser this time, not a guest who turns up with a box of devices.

From learning, to coaching, to testing

My first swim camps looked nothing like this one. Five or six years ago I came to them mainly to learn to swim better myself. I worked on my technique and collected experience that I could not have picked up anywhere else. Two or three years later I thought it might be worth passing some of that on, so I started showing up at camps as an assistant coach.

Now the roles have turned around a little. At this camp I could not only run sessions, but also hand a device to every swimmer in the group and put the whole set through a proper test.

So instead of only training and resting, I prepared a presentation for the evening. The next day the coaches and I built a training session around the test, so the device had to work inside real training rather than next to it.

What a lab cannot show you

Camps like this one remind me of something important: lab tests are only a fragment of reality. A pool, and open water even more, show you real behaviour and real problems.

This time one of them surfaced within minutes. In very bright light the display was too dark to read. I knew about the problem. The device already let you raise the brightness, but the setting did not save permanently. On one device, on a desk, that is a small annoyance you work around without thinking. With more than a dozen devices in the hands of swimmers on a bright morning, it was impossible to miss. I fixed it in the firmware the next day.

One test instead of ten

At first I wanted to test many things at once, for example controlling several devices at the same time. I dropped that idea. We picked one scenario, we ran it, and I watched how the swimmers actually used the device. The test went really well, and the value of keeping it narrow was obvious: with one thing to observe, every observation was clean.

Ideas I would not have had on my own

At one point I looked down and saw more than a dozen devices switched on and lying around, doing nothing at all. The conclusion was simple: why should they be on? The device has motion sensors, so the answer wrote itself. It now powers off automatically after 35 minutes without movement, unless it is sitting on the charger.

What I enjoy just as much is that people who see a device like this for the first time notice its potential on their own, and come back with uses I never considered. Marek, who is a diver, suggested testing it a few metres under water, and using it for EMOM training, Every Minute On the Minute. That mode is already implemented, and Marek is testing it right now. If you want the background, we wrote about EMOM and the other interval modes earlier this year.

What the camp changed in the product

Four days across three lakes produced a shorter and better list than four days at a desk would have:

• Brightness that stays where you put it. The setting now survives a power cycle, so nobody has to fix the display again before every set.
• Automatic power off. After 35 minutes without movement, and not on the charger, the device switches itself off.
• EMOM mode. Suggested by a diver on the shore, implemented after the camp, and in testing now.
• Multi device control stays on the list. It was the one thing I decided not to test this time. It gets its own session, at its own camp.

The people are the point

A big thank you goes to Paweł Lewicki and Aleksander Ryszka for their support and their help with the test.

Every camp is different. Doctors, miners, business analysts, athletes, triathletes and plenty of other people end up in the same lakes, and one thing connects all of them: swimming.

As a co-organiser, Vimo Swim also covered a swim cap for every participant, so the whole group swam in the same caps all week and took them home at the end.

Camp coaches: Aleksander Ryszka, Paweł Lewicki, and Mariusz Smenżyk.