Underwater,
the wall is the
interaction.
Water Lock is on. There is no audio in your ear, no tapping mid-length, no glancing at a pace gauge. Swim coaching has a few seconds at each wall — so we designed the whole experience around that window instead of pretending it isn't there.
Live, in build,
and on the list.
Athlea ships other sports today; swimming is the newest channel and the spec is public inside the company. Rather than write marketing copy that outruns the code, here is the split as it stands.
Swimming breaks
every assumption running made.
Athlea's running experience gave every other sport its skeleton — states, the watch-to-phone handoff, the debrief. Swimming is the first sport to inherit it and the first to break it, because of what a wrist can and cannot do in water.
The phone does the
thinking beforehand.
Everything you need to understand about the session happens on dry land. Today's swim, why it was chosen, what each set is for, and what pace holds it together — read before you get in, because you will not be reading anything once you do.
200s
Today's session, the week, and the watch-push receipt.
Sets as effort-coloured arcs; laps as the outer tick ring.
A set is reps, rest
and a clock you push off on.
Swim prescription has its own grammar, and we are not flattening it into "do 2 km easy". Sets group into warm-up, drill, pre-set, main and cool-down. Each carries a distance, a stroke, an effort level, equipment and a send-off — the interval clock you leave the wall on.
Each rep as swim versus rest inside the send-off.
One number,
read wet.
Rest between reps is fifteen to twenty seconds, through goggles, out of breath, with water on the glass. So the watch shows one dominant numeral and at most one secondary. Colour carries status. Everything else waits for the phone.
Last split, huge. Send-off, second.
One glyph. Rep number and effort dot.
OFF
Haptic on the wall, one verb, the split beneath.
Critical Swim Speed,
named out loud.
CSS is swimming's threshold — the pace you can hold more or less indefinitely, estimated from a 400 m and a 200 m time trial. Other apps bury it behind "seed times" and "energy zones". We use the term, show you the number, and hang the whole prescription off it: your send-offs, your pace band at the wall, and the state model your swim shares with every other sport you do.
The app tells you how confident it is
A state claim is only as good as the anchor underneath it. When we do not have a recent test, we say so and drop to plain heart-rate zones rather than dressing up a guess in state colours.
Nothing streams
while you're wet.
Mid-set there is no signal in water and no reason to spend battery pretending otherwise. The watch runs the swim offline and holds everything. At the finish you eject the water and the session moves in one transfer — then the phone builds the debrief while you're still walking to the changing room.
Your best time is the
first thing you see.
Swim apps bury personal bests in a settings screen next to your seed times. We lead with them — on the wrist, before you have dried off — and then the phone takes seven pages to explain what the session actually did to you.
Time in State, comparable to any run or ride you do.
The lead card, not a buried record.
Distance owns the screen; three stats at the base.
No walls. So the whole
model has to move.
Open water is the same set runner with one prop changed — but the coaching moment goes with the wall. There is no clean per-100 to compare against your CSS, so pace comes from GPS and effort is inferred from a pace model plus heart rate. We label that estimate as an estimate on the screen rather than quietly presenting it as the same measurement you get in a pool.
GPS pace leads; the state reading is flagged as an estimate.
Things we want to build.
Not things we've built.
These are on the plan and nothing more than that. No dates, no waiting list, no implication that any of it is around the corner. They are here because they say something honest about where the swimming channel is heading.
Three ways to train your swim.
Marked honestly — including what's still in build.
A chatbot can write you a set. A swim app can count your laps. Athlea's coached swim is in build — so the table says so, with the same Live / In-build split as everything else on this page.
Swimming
Help us build it
in the water.
The swimming channel is being built now, and the two things it rests on — turn detection and a haptic you can feel at speed — get decided in a pool, not a design review. If you swim, we want you in the beta early enough to change it.