What do you want from a running / outdoors watch?

[Caractacus]

For those of us who do running, trails, hiking etc for fitness, what do you want out of a training watch?

For example, is GPS accuracy really important or do you carry a smartphone and use Strava or something?

Do you want navigation info or just heart rate, pace etc?

Are you bothered whether it has accurate altitude, or need a barometer?

Do you want it to look nice enough to wear to a business meeting or would it just be something for training with and hence can look like a plastic 80's calculator watch?

Do you want to analyse data across many dimensions or are you happy with some basic metrics that are easy to access?

[Plateauplower]

I would want it to have an oxygen tank with a hose to my mouth and electrodes going to my legs that deliver shocks and make them do a running type motion

My phone does pretty much everything I need. I have a sports tracker ap that has gps, and all kinds of features, even a map for when I get lost.

[Caractacus]

I didn't think of the oxygen tank/electrodes option. Perhaps you should consider Kickstarter funding

I find fiddling with my phone a distracting hassle when I'm attempting to run, which is what got me thinking about watches.

[Plateauplower]

I didn't think of the oxygen tank/electrodes option. Perhaps you should consider Kickstarter funding

I find fiddling with my phone a distracting hassle when I'm attempting to run, which is what got me thinking about watches.

I just turn on the ap, turn on the tunes and dont look at the phone again unless I want to change music or check time/distance if running or biking or where i am if hiking in the woods.

[crupiea]

You have to do the math man.

i mean really, how far are you going to run? 10 miles, 5 miles? even 20 or 30 miles? hell, even at the highest end you can still find your way home. just turn around and follw the way you came in.

as for altitude, lets get real here. maybe a couple thousand feet of elevation change if that on your best day.

I used to have a timex heart rate monitro with the chest strap thing.

What it really did for me was help me set my training pace from treadmill to road.

i could tell when i was on the road by looking at the watch what my pace was with suprising accuracy.

so good in fact that my first half marathon was 7:41 per mile. yes brag because that was the average for 13 plus miles.

so they do have a purpose as long as you know what you want to use them for.

you really dont need that many features to get the job done.

[pryme]

My everyday watch is a Casio Gshock rangeman. It has the triple sensor ver 2 Altitude, baro with temp and digital compass.
It also is a 6 band atomic time capable watch. It has 42 times from around the world.
It also is solar powered.
Has sunrise and sunset. Has five daily alarms with a snooze. Has a countdown timer. Has alarms you can set for elevations reached.
It has settable light duration and can be set to light when you bring you hand up to check time.
It's also 20bar water resistant(200 meters)

Yeah, it also has a kitchen sink......

[Gabbar99]

For those of us who do running, trails, hiking etc for fitness, what do you want out of a training watch?

For example, is GPS accuracy really important or do you carry a smartphone and use Strava or something?

Do you want navigation info or just heart rate, pace etc?

Are you bothered whether it has accurate altitude, or need a barometer?

Do you want it to look nice enough to wear to a business meeting or would it just be something for training with and hence can look like a plastic 80's calculator watch?

Do you want to analyse data across many dimensions or are you happy with some basic metrics that are easy to access?

Why are you asking?

I'm more of a runner who lifts than a lifter who runs. Among runners it's assumed you have a "Garmin", i.e., a GPS watch. Garmin is the Kleenex of GPS watches. Most runners track and upload the details of their distance and pace. Many also get their heartrate and cadence. You might need a footpod for the cadence. I see GPS watches in business meetings, most of them don't look like anything weird.

Not everybody has a GPS watch. I don't. I use the RunKeeper app on my phone but there are some frustrations with that and I can see me getting a Garmin in the near future. I'm fine with the elevation resolution on that. I like the big phone screen to see what's going on, I might not like the limited screen of a watch. Yesterday I was running a 14 miler in an unfamiliar area and RunKeeper wouldn't switch to the map view for some reason. So I just opened the map app. So if I tracked with a GPS watch, I could use the phone to look at maps.

I don't care about the running app playing my music and don't get why they advertise that like it's a thing. I can play the music from a music app.

Just this week I bought an old-school heartrate monitor because I felt I was doing my easy runs too easy. I was right. It's a good tool to keep you in the zone you want to be in. You can get a bluetooth heartrate monitor that will sync with RunKeeper. That'd be nice so you could have it with your run data but it won't sync with my older generation Android phone and I didn't feel like getting a new phone, so I just got a cheap monitor with its own watch to check heartrate. Have a heartrate app on my phone, it's fine for checking resting heart rate but it doesn't work well when you're moving.

About 10 years ago my son and I had a contract with Backpacker magazine to do GPS tracking of trails. Several of our tracks were featured in the magazine. They provided us with a GPS phone unit. We also had a watch with barometer for elevation, but that didn't seem to be that accurate.

[Caractacus]

Thanks for that. Very much the sort of insight I was after.

I'm asking because I'm an old guy trying to get fit again and I've lost enough weight now that I've started running as well as lifting.

I was aware that running watches existed and I've found trying to use my phone as one a hassle.

Looking at reviews for stuff like Garmins I found myself thinking:

' ... a lot of that stuff is probably pointless gimmickry dreamed up by feature-obsessed marketing droids, I wonder what's important?'

[quietchef]

For trails, I usually look at a topo prior. From there I just set a timer on the phone for when I need to turn around and go.

Enjoy the outdoors and your training, stats don't count for much if you aren't enjoying it. If there's a significant elevation change, I'll go back to the topo and calculate it. Other than that tidbit, knowing how to plan ahead, read a topo, and be prepared is more valuable than a wrist watch or smartphone.

[Gabbar99]

Thanks for that. Very much the sort of insight I was after.

I'm asking because I'm an old guy trying to get fit again and I've lost enough weight now that I've started running as well as lifting.

I was aware that running watches existed and I've found trying to use my phone as one a hassle.

Looking at reviews for stuff like Garmins I found myself thinking:

' ... a lot of that stuff is probably pointless gimmickry dreamed up by feature-obsessed marketing droids, I wonder what's important?'

A gazillion reviews: http://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews

[OnsightRepair]

Which watch do I wear?

Whichever one gets me the ladies.

[BiomedDood]

As someone who does 2 street runs/week and hike runs in summer, I can tell ya, GPS watches are a secondary item for casual runners.

I've owned a Suunto Ambit (both 1 and 2), and then the Garmin Fenix (1st gen) and eventually, decided they were all 'too much watch' for me. Ended up flipping them all on watch forums.

I use a Timex Ironman (non GPS) for my runs and am content with it. Again, I'm not running a marathon or trying to compete in Ironman competitions so daily run stats don't play any major significance in my life.

I lift, do cardio on the treadmill and do street runs when the weather complys.

I found the Ambit/Fenix were more oriented at Ironman style activities (runs, then swims, bikes with cadence meter on) rather than aimed at stationery activities like lifting/treadmill. These stats were always off in terms of cals burnt. Then it became a headache trying to get data synced to MoveCount website and the accuracy. I started spending unnecessary time on moot stuff like these.

In the end, it was just too much hassle. But yeah...these gadgets too provide a good way of dedication and commitment (especially if you sync the data to Movecount so you get daily reminders on 'how far did u run today', etc) .

To each his own ;-).

[scullin]

I'm oldschool, I just use a Casio G-Shock with nothing more than a stopwatch.

[tsoden]

I have a Garmin Forerunner 305. I use it for running and cycling. For running I only really care about the GPS distance calculator as well as the interval training functions. For cycling I used the heart rate monitor, Cadence sensor, and speed and distance functions.

[JRT6]

I got the new polar M400 for $200- after reading all the reviews in dcrainmaker and I'm and getting my monies worth is spades. The watch and GPS haven't screwed up yet and has all the features I need for indoor and outdoor training.