THE FUTURE OF SWIM TRAINING

In a move that revolutionised swimming, FORM has created a set of goggles that gives users a whole new training and racing experience. With the help of founder Dan Eisenhardt and pro Lionel Sanders, we take a look at how and why....

- HELEN WEBSTER 

Ask any triathlete which part of their training they find the most mentally challenging and most will say pool swimming. The indoor environment, the staring at the black line, the need to keep your mind occupied without visual stimulation or communication with others it's a challenge, right? It's a challenge, however, that sparked the imagination of a young mechanical engineering student and led him on a journey that would ultimately, via a few twists and turns, lead to the goggles you see in front of you. Enter Dan Eisenhardt, at this point a fresh-faced 400m and 1500m freestyle swimmer competing for his home nation of Denmark and wondering where his career might take him...

"I spent a lot of hours in the pool staring at the bottom wondering what my splits were, with my coach yelling and trying to get a few instructions in then trying to do the mental math and looking at the pool clock in between laps," says Dan. "I think that's when I started thinking, well, maybe there's another way of doing this?"

"This was back when smartwatches were starting to come out. Polar and Timex, I think, were some of the early ones that were able to do something in the pool, but they weren't really automated. You still had to start and stop them and it wasn't really seamless. And of course, you couldn't see the interface as you swam." Fast forward a few years and Dan's choice of mechanical engineering as a university subject led him away from swimming to a masters, then a few years as a management consultant. Aged 30 though, he decided to complete an MBA in Australia and in a twist of fate (Dan walked into the wrong lecture theatre) he ended up applying for – and getting - a year in Vancouver on an exchange programme looking at business entrepreneurship. That quirk in his timeline brought him to Canada, where FORM are based, and also caused him to revisit his idea about revolutionizing swim training.