My audible, underwater adventures

At first the water felt ice cold as his waist first was submerged. He felt a tingling in his recently injured shoulder as his arm sliced through the water, hurling himself closer to the headland. Another wave crashed over his head as the taste of salt started to set in. His ears wear blasting with the sound of “bubbles… gasp… bubbles… gasp” mixed with the words “We worked for some months in a spacious basement suite in which we had set up a closed-circuit system that projected an image of the subject’s pupil on a screen in the corridor…”.

It’s okay, I understand that confused look on your face right now.

You’re thinking, “What on earth is Luke on about?”, “What on earth is he describing?”, or perhaps “WHY IS HE TELLING ME THIS?! IS HE MAD?”.

I was describing myself at 7:05 this morning as I went swimming down at Manly Beach again, but this time there was one important difference…

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls I have an announcement: I can now be less focused on my horrible drowning-style swimming and pass the time while listening to audiobooks, podcasts or music!

While my Avantree Jogger Bluetooth Headphones have been great for running and cycling, allowing me to pass the time while I put down some long kilometres but so far this hasn’t extended to swimming – my least favourite, most boring sport that needs the most improvement.

So back in December I was searching through a range of iPhone 5S/5 bluetooth headphones to try and find waterproof ones and a waterproof case for the iPhone (which in hindsight would have been pretty bulky for swimming) and low and behold, thanks to the genius of “related products” I saw this pair of headphones that are actually an waterproof MP3 player!

When I got my first Sony Walkman at 2 years old it was a radio/cassette tape player that hooked me onto audiobooks, I would never have anticipated that decades later I’d be using a new model walkman (NWZ-W273) to seamlessly listen to audiobooks underwater!

So how’s the experience? They’re comfortable enough considering they function underwater. Listening to music is a piece of cake, podcasts are fine too. Audiobooks are harder because you have to make sure you don’t accidentally have it on shuffle. Also be careful to slice the audiobook into small segments in case you accidentally skip forward or backwards and lose your place. It’s a little nuanced but well worth it.

All in all, I’m really excited about continuing to use these. It’ll really help my swimming training knowing that I have the likes of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” waiting for me…1.5km at a time!