It has been an excellent year for sports watches, with Garmin refreshing almost its entire line-up while Suunto and Coros both released their best devices to date. Barely a week has gone by that I haven’t had at least one new watch on my wrist to test, and usually I’ve been wearing two at a time, with one or two more watches strapped on during runs to gather even more priceless data to compare.
Of the 19 new watches I’ve tested, plus the several older devices I’ve also used this year, there are many I’d be happy to wear as my main sports watch to track my marathon training, but two I consider standouts that I’d look at buying myself. They are the Garmin Forerunner 970, which is the best sports watch I’ve tested this year overall, and the Coros Pace 4, which is the best value option I’ve tried. Here's what you need to know about these running watches.
Garmin Forerunner 970 — best sports watch overall
The Garmin Forerunner 970 is the top-of-the-line Forerunner, and essentially offers the same features as the Garmin Fenix 8 in a lighter, plastic case that fits me better and is generally more suitable for runners and triathletes than the metal Fenix, in my opinion.
Ever since I tested the Garmin Forerunner 935, the flagship Forerunner has almost always been my go-to option in the brand’s line-up, and the Forerunner 970 is a significant upgrade on past models.
The upgrades begin with the hardware, as the Forerunner 970 is more durable than its predecessors, thanks to a sapphire crystal display and a thicker titanium bezel. The sapphire screen is big for me, as someone who scratched the glass display on the Garmin Forerunner 965 during testing.
There is also a built-in flashlight on the top of the watch, which is a very handy tool to have on your wrist and one of the reasons I sometimes opted for the Garmin Epix or Fenix over a Forerunner in the past.
As you’d expect from one of the best Garmin watches, the Forerunner 970 offers extensive sports tracking and training analysis, along with incredible navigation tools, including offline maps that are routable, so you can create routes on the go using just the watch.
Garmin introduced several new sports features with the Forerunner 970, too, with my favorite being running tolerance, which estimates your training load based on both distance and intensity.
The full package is hard to top, unless you need an adventure watch with extra connectivity like the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro. The Garmin Forerunner 970 is a good-looking watch too, and if its high price doesn’t scare you off, this is the best sports watch you can get right now.
Coros Pace 4 — best value sports watch
The Forerunner 970 is brilliant, but very expensive, and if I were shopping now, the Coros Pace 4 is a hard watch to resist because of how much it offers for less than half the price of the Garmin.
It’s incredibly light and comfortable to wear with a 1.2in AMOLED display. Despite its small size and bright screen, the Pace 4 still offers impressive battery life, usually lasting me five or six days on a charge when running every day — you can also extend this by turning the screen to raise-to-wake instead of always-on.
The GPS accuracy has been spot on throughout my testing, and I’ve also had pretty good results with the heart rate accuracy of the Pace 4 compared with a chest strap, though it’s not infallible.
Coros has put all of its training analysis features onto the Pace 4, despite it being its entry-level watch, and while these aren’t as extensive as the analysis on the Forerunner 970, there’s still plenty of data to get your teeth into and guide your workouts.
You don’t get maps on the Pace 4, but it does have breadcrumb navigation with turn-by-turn directions, which is usually enough to get me where I need to be.
While some won’t like the all-plastic design of the Pace 4, I think it’s a pretty good-looking watch, and as someone with thin wrists, its lightweight, thin case is perfect.
If you don’t need all the bells and whistles you get on the Forerunner 970 and/or are operating with a tighter budget, the Coros Pace 4 is the watch I’d get. It still has everything athletes of all levels need to track their training, and it’s simple to use, too.
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