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In this review we’re going to take a look at two goggles from Finis: the lightning and the bolt.  Both are swim racing goggles, the bolt labeled “comfort racing” and the lightning “minimalist racing”.

The Finis Lightning

The lightning is a very adjustable minimalist racing goggle.  The lenses come in your choice of red, blue or aqua.  Each set of goggles comes with 4 nosepieces to get a good fit.

The Lightning also has a quick adjustment strap which makes getting the band to the right level of fit pretty easy.

I really enjoyed swimming with the Lightning.  The minimalist eyecup really fits my face well.  I found the optical quality of these goggles to be superior to many I’ve tried with very little distortion.  I expect this is because the eye cup is so small that you rarely look through anything but the main lens part of the cup.

The Finis Bolt

The Bolt is a larger eyecup racing goggle.  Labeled as a comfortable racing goggle it has a little more padding than the Lightning and with the larger eye cup may give wearers a little less eye strain than a smaller more minimalist goggle.  The Bolt also comes with 4 interchangeable nose bridges and a fully adjustable strap to get a good fit.

For me, the Bolt required a bit of fussing to get a good facial fit.  Unlike the Lightning that formed a great fit to my face, the Bolt needed some nose bridge and strap adjusting to get a watertight seal.  Once it was there though, it was solid and comfortable.

General Comments

Both of these are good goggles.  They are both very adjustable and have good optics. Both have UV and anti-fog coatings.  With respect to anti-fog coatings, I must have very moist eyes or sweat through my eyes a lot because I find that unless I use an anti-fog product on my goggles, after 10-15 minutes of effort, they all fog.  Both of these goggles lasted about 30 minutes before starting to fog, which may speak to having a really superior anti-fog coating and just my body’s ability to overcome them 🙂

If you’re in the market for goggles, definitely check these out.  Like so many things, this is especially true with goggles: one size does not fit all.  Make sure to get a goggle that suits your face shape and you’ll be setup for many hundreds of hours of leak free swimming.