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A Quick Guide to Fancy Sport Watches
If you ever log trail time, you see ‘em everywhere: schmancy sport watches on people’s wrists, GPS-tracking their exploits and posting their times to the Stravawebs. And, if you’re like us, you might have resisted getting a sport watch. There are plenty of reasons to resist: your phone has a GPS in it too, and there are plenty of apps to track your movement and fitness and basically everything else. Not to mention the cost of a schmancy sport watch, which, it can be argued, is better spent on a summer’s worth of apres-bike beers.
This resistance is understandable, but there are a few good reasons to consider a sport watch—and there are a huge range of features, options, and prices to choose from. You can go as high-end or simple as you choose, and of course, if you can get one
UnNew, all the better. (You can often find a good selection of gently used or not-even-used watches here on
Geartrade.)
Why consider one?
Depending on the watch you choose, it may have much nicer, more accurate GPS tracking than your phone. And if you’re training seriously, those numbers (and the knowledge they provide) are power. It’s also much easier to glance down at your watch mid-run or mid-ride to check the time and stay on track with your training plan of the day, rather than pulling your phone out and trying to run drills while holding it in front of you and using the timer function.
Watches these days also fill a lot of the roles you might lean on your phone for—doing snazzy stuff like showing you your text messages, showing your location on a trail map, or even broadcasting your running playlist to Spotify. This can free you up to leave your phone behind, or it can serve as a backup if your phone dies before your adventure day is through.
Some watches now measure a sophisticated array of health stats, such as your sleep time/quality, your heart rate, your blood oxygen, your projected recovery time post-workout, and more. Some even have safety features like “incident detection” or an emergency button you can press to notify loved ones of your location and request help—a feature that helps lots of female adventurers rest a little easier. (Because, unfortunately, we still live in a world in which women have to be hypervigilant when doing something as wild and crazy as walking on a trail alone.)
A good watch has a much longer battery life in GPS tracking mode than your phone does, which is helpful for full-day adventures. Some of them even have built-in solar recharging so the watch tops off its own power over the course of the day.
A high-level overview of features and factors to consider:
Entire websites and blogs are devoted to analyzing sport watches, and if you go down a rabbit hole, you can get hyper detailed in the pros and cons of various technologies. We’ll just keep things high-level here to give you a starting point.
Complexity
An expensive, complex feature set doesn't always make the watch “better” … in fact, it can be so overwhelmingly user-unfriendly that you don’t make the most of its features, or worse, never actually figure out how to use it and it ends up in a box in the closet. (I am mortally embarrassed to say it took me forever to figure out my first Garmin watch had a touchscreen. I thought the buttons were just incredibly non-intuitive. Oops.)
Battery life
How long is your typical adventure? How long is your longest-ever adventure? Some watches crap the bed after a few hours, with many dying after the ten-hour mark. If you’re actively GPS tracking, such as on a huge long mountain day, the watch battery drains much faster. We can’t hardly express how sad it is to track the first ten hours of an epic mountain adventure, only to have your watch shut down on you for the last hour or two. Make sure to find a watch with enough battery life for your biggest pursuits. Solar-recharging watches can be a lifesaver here.
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Not just sporty—mountain sporty
You may need a watch intended for use in the remote backcountry. (If you’re reading Geartrade’s blog, you might be that user set rather than exclusively a city runner.) If so, a watch with more sophisticated navigation features, such as a fancy little on-screen map with your route and location, can be amazing. Mountain athletes are also likely to care about data like vertical gain, and just might have an interest in the weather forecast.
A backcountry-specific watch may be designed to communicate with multiple global navigation satellite systems rather than just GPS, adding GLONASS and Galileo too. Don’t let a thick forest get in the way of your location tracking at a time when you need it most.
Bulky, svelte, or in-between
Some people don’t mind the look of a chunkier watch, but if you have a smaller wrist or gravitate toward a more feminine design sensibility, low-profile watches will feel important. Of course, as an outdoor athlete, covering a lot of ground, it helps if the watch is nice and lightweight so you don’t feel like you’re carrying a radio on your wrist.
Bluetooth enabled
Bluetooth is a standard way for watches to communicate with your phone as well as the
great big data cloud in the sky. Just make sure the watch has it, as some older watches only easily pair with a computer via a special cord, which is clunkier and requires you to actually have your computer around.
Compatibility with apps you like
There are so many fitness apps, programs, and platforms out there now, and they all have their pros and cons. Different watch brands sync up and upload your activities to certain apps/platforms, so check if a watch is compatible with one you’re partial to, like Strava, TrainingPeaks, HealthFit, or a myriad of others.
Sports options
Old-school watches used to only offer activity settings like Run, Bike, or Swim. Now, you can get a rad outdoorsy-person-specific watch that lets you get much more detailed in your sports options, with activities like mountain biking, backcountry skiing, open-water, swimming, climbing, or even bouldering. If you have multi-sport outings, such as triathlons, on the docket, you might also want a watch that lets you combine multiple sports in one outing so you don’t have to stop and fiddle with your watch for each segment.
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Smartphone-y-ness
If the idea of ditching your phone for runs and rides sounds appealing, do you want a watch that displays your text messages? Makes contactless payments when you want a mid-run Gatorade at the gas station? Play your Spotify running playlist in your bluetooth headphones?
Training tips and health insights
Some watches include robust training software that can guide your workout plans. The watch can even monitor your health stats and suggest just how much energy (or, in Garmin’s terms, “Body Battery” power) you have that day, as well as how long you’ll need to rest and recover before your next workout.
Heart rate is also an increasingly popular stat for watches to measure, as it provides super-helpful insights for your training. Heart rate monitoring on your wrist isn’t traditionally considered quite as accurate as monitoring with a chest strap, but the technology is continually improving, and it’s not a bad feature to have either way.
Garmin FENIX 6S on Geartrade
Built-in GPS
If your needs are really simple, you might choose an inexpensive watch that piggybacks off your phone’s GPS (which is less accurate and forces you to always carry your phone—and your phone has to always be charged). A nicer watch will have built-in GPS, and some even access multiple location systems (such as the backcountry-specific features we mentioned above) for better location accuracy and distance tracking even in dense forests or deep canyons.
Safety features
As mentioned earlier, some watches make it easy to call for help at the press of a button, alerting pre-set contacts to your location. And some, such as some Garmin models, come with “incident detection,” which may be able to detect if you’re in an abrupt accident and need help. This can actually be a godsend if you’re running, skiing, or biking alone, and have an extremely sudden stop or impact, which signals to your watch that you may have just had a bad crash. The watch will ask you if you want it to call for help. If you don’t tell it not to, it’ll go ahead and notify loved ones of your location and the possibility that you might need help. For outdoor adventurists who occasionally fly solo, this is actually a very cool feature.
Screen readability
This feels like a nice-to-have in comparison with some of the above safety features, but a watch is only as good as it is readable. Make sure you check reviews or inspect the watch yourself to confirm it’ll be easy to read even mid-activity on the trail or skintrack.
What watch features matter most to you? We’d love to hear—and see you out on the trails with fabulously UnNew watches and new insights to take your training to greater heights.
Beth Lopez is a seasoned writer and creative director who loves to tell tales of adventure and discovery—and finds writing a powerful way to give a voice to people, causes, and places. Beth runs amok in the Wasatch mountains when untethered from her computer. She believes there’s no such thing as a bad ski day and considers animals her favorite people. Don’t tell her mother about her Instagram mountaineering photos.
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