Sanyo Xacti Waterproof Video Camera, Friend or Foe?
Recently I had a talk with a friend and professional triathlete Daniel Bretscher about helping me with my swim. He mentioned the first step might be to video tape my swim so he could take a look at it. From there maybe some individual lessons would be in order. He then mentioned someone else he was working with did this with a fairly inexpensive and waterproof video camera, specifically the Sanyo Xacti VPC-E2 model. With $165 and a week’s wait from Amazon.com my shiny new camera arrived in the mail.
On a Monday morning at the Student Rec Center I met Joe for a swim workout with the camera. After a brief warm up I videotaped him for a few minutes, then he did the same for me. I thought I was swimming fairly smooth, but I know my swim technique was not particularly good, but I thought it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t really do any lap swimming until I was 30 so no real swimming background to go from. I have to admit when I did swim in high school gym class I was terrible.
Well I returned to the office and later in the day when I had a few minutes I replayed the video just watching on the LCD screen from the camera itself. Here is where the foe part comes in. The long and short of it is my swim technique stinks. To be honest I woke up in the middle of the night just thinking how bad it was. It passed my mind that maybe I should give up swimming, but then I not much for giving up. I still have high hopes of competing at the top of my age group in the Ironman 70.3 series, so the next alternative is to use the camera to make my swim better no matter how long it takes.
As the camera itself goes, it seems to be a real bargain for a fairly moderate price. Hopefully we will become more friends in the future and less of a foe. One can only wonder if we videotaped our everyday life and played it back. How many times would we shake our head and wonder why we made so many mistakes. Even the things we think we are okay at might be exposed as something much less than desirable. Something to think about for the future …
On a Monday morning at the Student Rec Center I met Joe for a swim workout with the camera. After a brief warm up I videotaped him for a few minutes, then he did the same for me. I thought I was swimming fairly smooth, but I know my swim technique was not particularly good, but I thought it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t really do any lap swimming until I was 30 so no real swimming background to go from. I have to admit when I did swim in high school gym class I was terrible.
Well I returned to the office and later in the day when I had a few minutes I replayed the video just watching on the LCD screen from the camera itself. Here is where the foe part comes in. The long and short of it is my swim technique stinks. To be honest I woke up in the middle of the night just thinking how bad it was. It passed my mind that maybe I should give up swimming, but then I not much for giving up. I still have high hopes of competing at the top of my age group in the Ironman 70.3 series, so the next alternative is to use the camera to make my swim better no matter how long it takes.
As the camera itself goes, it seems to be a real bargain for a fairly moderate price. Hopefully we will become more friends in the future and less of a foe. One can only wonder if we videotaped our everyday life and played it back. How many times would we shake our head and wonder why we made so many mistakes. Even the things we think we are okay at might be exposed as something much less than desirable. Something to think about for the future …
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