Club Benefits
Since launching its first sports watch in 2018, Coros has quickly closed the gap on the biggest brands in the space with regards to hardware, making some of the lightest and most durable devices available.
When it comes to software, however, Coros still lags behind the best Garmin watches in terms of both the amount and depth of sports tracking, navigation and training analysis features.
Article continues belowThese are Pace Strategy and Hill Alerts, which I think are the pick of the nine new Coros features coming, but there’s also a new weekly mileage widget and hybrid fitness workout mode that looks ideal for Hyrox events.
Pace Strategy
The new Pace Strategy feature on Coros watches is similar to Garmin’s PacePro tool and can help you to pace races in particular using a strategy that accounts for hills on the route, or an overall approach like a negative split, where you get faster over the course of the race.
You can set up a strategy for a distance, or pick a route from your library. In the former case, the tool is quite simple — you pick a distance, set a target time, and then whether you want to run an even pace, speed up throughout, or start fast to take into account slowing down near the end.
Your strategy will be given split times to aim for based on these settings, which will show on your watch throughout the race along with an estimate of how far/ahead of your target time you are.
Using a route means that the tool will give target times for each split that take into account the elevation involved, so it’s handy for trail runs in particular where you might want to hit an overall time, but take uphills slowly and speed up on flatter and downhill segments.
The Pace Strategy tool is quick and easy to use, and I can see it being very handy for an event like the Boston Marathon, where you have to get a little ahead of your overall target pace on early downhills to account for the uphill sections late on the course.
Hill Alerts
Garmin’s ClimbPro tool has always been one of my favorite sports watch features, so I’m delighted to see something similar come to Coros watches via the Hill Alerts update.
This will analyze the route you’re following on your watch and break out all the significant uphill and downhill sections individually, so you can preview them and then get alerts when you arrive at them during your run.
These will show the climb or descent on your watch, color-coding the steepness of your route and how far through the hill you are, so you can judge your effort accordingly.
I find this feature very useful during long climbs in particular, because with switchbacks and/or tree cover it’s rare you can actually see the top of the climb ahead of you, so knowing how much more uphill there is to come means you can pace yourself so you don’t run out of steam.
Other New Features
Another feature I’m looking forward to using from the update is a weekly distance widget, which just shows your mileage for running, cycling and swimming. I like to keep tabs on my running distance each week, especially when marathon training.
For Hyrox enthusiasts, the new hybrid fitness sports mode looks perfect, since it can track the various exercises you do during an event, and even automatically switch between stations, so you can track your time and performance on each station to look at afterwards.
Other updates include the option to put a passcode on your watch, and the ability to increase the font size on notifications.
All of these updates will be rolling out automatically within the Coros app in the near future, so it’s worth checking in occasionally to see if your watch is ready to update.
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