Iron Mike here presents to you twelve days of gift ideas for the marathon swimmer in your life. Check back daily!

Day ten: Saturday, 23 December. Lap counter.

If you swim by yourself in a pool, you need a way to keep track of the distances you’ve swum. Swimmers with a coach can simply follow the workout, and at the end know how many yards or meters they’ve swum.

But, if you’re like me and you swim without the benefit of a coach, you might need a way to keep track. For my long swims, a workout like 5 x 1000, I need a way to remember what lap I’m on. Especially in my tiny Russian pool where it takes 30 laps to do 1000 yards. Not to mention a longer swim like a 10,000 yard session, or 300 laps.

For this, I use the SportCounter Lap Counter. Simple piece of tech. It does one thing: it counts your laps. Well, that’s not completely true. It doesn’t automatically count your laps for you like some of those more expensive watches. This counter has a simple button you can press with your thumb and a small screen to tell you how many laps you’ve swum.

When I start my workout, I press the button (lap 1). Every time I return back to the “home” wall I press it again. If I get lost in the middle of the workout, day-dreaming my yards away, I can take a quick gander at the counter on my right index finger and figure out where I am in the workout. Easy peasy!