Last week I had a moment of weakness and I bought a new running watch. I already had an old Garmin watch, and a Series 1 Apple watch but neither quite did the job. The Garmin took a while to find satellites, and wouldn't talk to the running websites until after I'd plugged it into the laptop. Long runs with the apple watch killed the battery, and the touchscreen was rubbish in the rain.

But a popular online retailer had its sale last week, and had a really good deal on the Garmin Forerunner 245. I've been playing with it all week and here are my likes and dislikes so far.

As a Smartwatch

I want to focus on the running functions, but the first thing to say is that actually it's a pretty decent smartwatch! There's no touchscreen. Everything's done with 5 buttons on the side, but there's nothing I miss from the Apple watch. It shows me phone notifications, it can play a tone on my phone to help me find it, and as you'd expect it tracks calories etc, and its battery lasts ages! The only niggle is that it doesn't have a microphone or a speaker (apart from a beepy thing) so although you can push a button to answer/decline phone calls, you need to actually talk on your physical phone. I think I used this function on the apple watch twice in the 6 years I had it though, so no great loss.  Also you can install the Chrome Dinosaur game and have Mario as your watch face!




(Mario gets a power-up once you've hit your daily step count!)

Anyway.... on with the running functions!

Running Functions

To start a run you just tap the top right button, get to your start line and press the button again. GPS activates pretty much immediately and the screen displays all the stuff you'd imagine around distance, time and pace. You can customise these screens to show what particular information you want, so I have my main screen showing distance, time, and average pace for my current lap. I can then push the bottom left button to show any more stats I want to see while still on my run. It's that simple!

Extra running bits

But what I really like are the extras. You can set alerts to beep at you when you go over a certain pace and under a certain pace, but also you can set workouts on your phone that immediately get sent to your watch, saying things like "I want to do a 10 minute warm up, then 2 miles at 10 minute mile pace, then 1 mile recovery" and it will all appear on the screen.  You can also plan a route and send it to your watch so you don't get lost. Apparently there's a way to follow a route and do a workout a the same time, but I can't figure that out yet!

There are also set training plans you can download and it will nag you to go running on those days, but it only goes up to a half marathon so I haven't tried these. I've added my own runs to my calendar and that's been helpful.

After your run

After the run you get so much data thrown at you it's incredible. The app analyses your run, your pulse rate, your cadence, your pace, elevation, distance, everything. It tells you off for what you did badly and praises you for what you've done well. It gives you so many badges for things that you feel like you're in an episode of Hey Duggee.


So yeah, new toy! But very much enjoying using it so far.