RUNNING WATCHES
Track your training, race stronger and recover quicker with the best running watches available in 2024
A good running watch is a powerful tool. The coaching elements can help fine-tune your training, measure your performance and progress, and boost motivation. Even the cheaper options now cover the basics, with reliable GPS, wristbased heart rate tracking and loads of training, coaching and recovery insights to help you hit any goal. Whatever your ambitions, here are the best running watches you can buy right now.
What makes a good watch?
The best running watches get the basics right, with accurate heart rate, fast satellite link-up and reliable GPS tracking for pace and distance. Along with good runtime GPS battery life, these are the non-negotiables. The good news: you can now find these essential features in even the cheapest running watches.
A good running watch boasts a bright, clear, crisp screen that’s easy to read in all light conditions, particularly on the move. There’s a big trend for AMOLED screens, with all the major brands, Polar, Suunto and Garmin, adding these Apple-esque super-sharp displays to their mid-to-premium watches. However, you might find you sacrifice longer battery life for such visual pleasures.
Customisation of your mid-run stats and post-run watch faces is also very handy. And the best watches offer zippy interfaces and responsive controls and touchscreen. You don’t want to be jabbing at unreactive buttons when you’re trying to take your splits.
When it comes to training insights, the best watches now track a huge array of metrics and offer up a broad sweep of feedback. That ranges from post-run training effect, the build-up of fatigue and recovery time recommendations, to heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, daily stress, sleep and even ECG. You might look for lifestyle health tools like sleep tracking and training readiness scores, but be warned: almost all of the sleep trackers lack accuracy, and the readiness scores that often rely on sleep data are fallible, too.
If you’re heading off grid onto the trails, or you plan to run an ultramarathon, the bigger, rugged adventure running watches like the Garmin Fenix 7 and COROS Vertix 2 offer more robust design, longer battery life and more powerful navigation tools.
If navigation is a priority, route planning with breadcrumb navigation is a given. But more capable watches offer turn-by-turn navigation, offline topographical maps and clever features like back-to-start, elevation profile and waypoint marking.
Smartwatch skills are improving and most watches now let you
