The pool I coach at (run by the ironically-branded “Better”) has two place clocks. One has not worked since August 2017 and I initially reported the problem at the start of September 2017. It’s awkward with just one because it isn’t visible from everywhere in the pool, nor to those swimmers whose eyesight either never has been, or is no longer, quite what it could be. Much whining and whinging later, Better finally told me in the first week of this month that a new pace clock had been ordered. It’s now the last day of the month and there’s still no sign of it 🙁
When I do USRPT sessions with my swimmers I time them myself to work around this problem of not having a usable pace clock, but it’s hardly a good solution, not least because it means we can’t do 25m sets, so I’ve been thinking about what else I can do. As an experiment this week I’ve ordered a couple of kitchen-type wall clocks with sweep second hands from my least unfavourite online auction site. They use the radio signal to set the time automagically, so I’m hoping they should stay nicely synchronised with each other.
My plan is to open the clocks up, remove the hour and minute hands (and make the second hand more obvious, if necessary) and replace the hour numbers on the face with numbers of seconds, then to mount the entire thing on a stand so it can be put at the end of the lane for the swimmers to use for tracking their target and turnaround times. More details once they’ve arrived.