I never imagined a watch like the Garmin Forerunner 970 when I started running

My running journey started with a Garmin Forerunner. It wasn’t my watch — it was my high school cross country coach’s — but it brought a load of new metrics to a sport I was learning to love. I was amazed that something so small could monitor our team’s distance, pace, and lap times. Alright, maybe it could only monitor those of us running with our coach at any given time, but it’s still much better than a simple stopwatch.

Little did I know that it was the most basic watch Garmin made. Yes, I learned to run with a Garmin Forerunner 10 beeping at me, never dreaming that I’d one day be using its successor to train for a marathon. Yet here I am with a Garmin Forerunner 970 on my wrist, essentially a smartwatch for runners, tracking metrics I never imagined. Here’s what makes it the best road running watch I’ve ever worn — but also why I think Garmin has gone too far in its quest to track literally everything.

For those of you who never got to experience the Garmin Forerunner 10 back in the day, let me enlighten you. Picture in your mind the most basic digital watch you can — make it a Casio, but not like a cool one. Are you thinking of one? Good. Now, give it a few extra buttons and a red ring around its square bezel, and you’ve got the Forerunner 10. Was there anything exciting about its design? Not really, but that’s what made it so special. It was a watch with a job, and it did that job incredibly well.

So, when I took the Forerunner 970 out of its box and put it on my wrist, I may as well have been strapping a UFO to my arm. It’s about as far apart from the Forerunner 10 as a watch could be, and I generally mean that in the best of ways. Long gone is the old black and white display that may as well have been for a Tamagotchi, with a crisp 1.4-inch AMOLED face sitting in its place. This isn’t my first adventure with Garmin’s vibrant new display style (I’ve previously worn everything from the Forerunner 965 to the Epix Pro 2 to the Instinct 3), but something about this housing might be my favorite.

Actually, I know what makes it my favorite: Despite being a pretty big watch with a singular 47mm case, the Garmin Forerunner 970 feels slim and sometimes invisible on my wrist. Sure, I’ve given myself a reminder or two that it’s not invisible — sorry, street signs and climbing gym holds — but the titanium bezel and Sapphire Crystal lens are no worse for wear. After I’ve worn a Garmin watch for this long, it’ll usually bear a battle scar or two, but the Forerunner 970 and its almost flush bezel are clean as the day I first put it on.

As a long-time Garmin user, I can report that the other hardware changes on the Forerunner 970 are minimal. It still uses the same five-button navigation as its predecessor (the Forerunner 965), though the top left button now triggers the built-in LED flashlight, much like its trail-ready counterparts. The proprietary four-pin charging port remains the same, too, which is fine, but I’d still love a Garmin watch with wireless charging so I can ditch at least one cable from my travel bag.

Also like Garmin’s more adventurous models — or at least the Fenix 8 — the Forerunner 970 now packs a microphone and speaker setup. In my experience, it’s kind of a blessing and a curse, giving me a quick way to pepper a voice assistant with questions, but also giving me very little excuse to ignore incoming calls. Sure, it’s fun speaking into my wrist like I’m James Bond, but if I’m in the middle of a workout, I’ll take any reason not to pick up while my brother is out walking his dog. The new speaker means that Garmin’s default chime any time I finish a mile is piercingly loud, too, so be warned that you’ll turn heads if you’re running with friends.

Under the hood, the Forerunner 970 more than lives up to its billing as a flagship wearable. I’ll save the comparisons to the far outmatched Forerunner 10 — the Forerunner 970 is better in every way except for day-to-day battery life — but know that this is where Garmin’s updates blow me away. Unlike the Forerunner 570 that my colleague Kaitlyn recently reviewed, this is a watch that cuts no corners, pairing the latest Elevate Gen 5 heart rate sensor with pulse ox tracking, ECG support (lookin’ at you, 570), and both Morning and Evening Reports that keep you on top of your day.

If you thought that was it, well, it’s not. The Forerunner 970 goes much further with everything from adaptive suggested workouts for running or cycling to support for Garmin Running and Cycling Coach programs. It’ll monitor everything from your sleep quality to your all-day stress and overall Body Battery, seamlessly adjusting your workout from one day to the next.

For the most part, this rules — I love knowing that my watch is looking out for me. However, it can sometimes cause just as much of a headache. I’ve occasionally checked my Evening Report for the next day’s workout, gone to bed prepared for speedwork, and woken up to a simple recovery run. If my nutrition were the same for both types of runs, I probably wouldn’t mind, but I go into a workout much differently than an easy run, so I’ve started memorizing my suggestions just in case they change.

Before I get into just how much of Garmin’s proverbial Kool-Aid I’ve consumed, let me make one more Forerunner 10 comparison. Back in the day, it felt like the height of luxury to have a watch that could store seven activities and lasted five hours in GPS mode. Now? The Forerunner 970 packs a cool 32GB of storage for use across music, activities, and watch faces, and its tracking battery life has improved by leaps and bounds. It’s maybe not up to what I was used to with the Fenix 8 AMOLED, but it’s not far off, as you’ll see shortly.

Anyway, back to the fact that the Forerunner 970 tracks just about everything. Simply put, this is a runner’s watch — it monitors your running efficiency and tolerance, which helps approximate the impact each run has on your body and what your ideal weekly mileage should be. It greets you every morning with a Training Readiness score before you’ve had time to stretch or warm up, and I genuinely believe that one day I’ll convince my training status that I am not, in fact, straining to hit my goals each week.

If you’re eyeing a chance to test your fitness, the Forerunner 970 supports Garmin’s Race Predictor, which tells you what your finish time should be for a 5K, 10K, half marathon, or full marathon given your recent activities. It also supports the more in-depth Projected Race Time, which is similar to the predictor, but also considers your upcoming training plan to give you two time estimates: One if the race were tomorrow, and another if you trained out into the future.

In my case, I’ve been using Garmin’s Connect Plus platform to train for an upcoming marathon, so I’ve been watching these metrics like a hawk. Right now, it estimates that I could run my race in 3:02:40, which would be a massive personal best. If I follow Garmin’s guidance, my PRT drops to 3:01:51, slightly better but not quite the sub-3:00:00 finish I’m eyeing.

When it comes to day-to-day tracking, the Forerunner 970 delivers just about everything I could ask for. I tested it with an 18-mile workout, and came away as happy with the watch as I was with myself. Everything was spot-on, from the route it traced as I looped around Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium to the slight elevation it registered as I ran towards the Federal Hill neighborhood for one of my more intense mile repeats.

Having lived through this workout, I can tell you exactly where each drop in my heart rate comes — usually during much-needed rest miles — promptly ending as I picked up the pace for yet another mile at marathon pace. I’d have loved my heart rate to be a little lower, but I can’t complain too much when battling the heat of a Mid-Atlantic summer. The important part is that the tracking followed that of my Coros Heart Rate Monitor just about to the beat, and I’d much rather trust just a watch than pair it to a bicep strap, at the very least for funky tan line purposes.

For a long time following the Forerunner 10, every Garmin watch I reviewed was just, well, better. The Forerunner 955 Solar that I started with felt like a breath of long-lasting fresh air once I learned to live with more buttons than my Coros Pace 2 used, and I would have happily believed that the Enduro 2 had limitless battery life with my once-a-month charge cycle. Even my spells with the Fenix 8 and Instinct 3 added something to the table and made me trust that I could go weeks without charging.

With the Forerunner 970, though, I’m getting my first taste of battery anxiety on a Garmin. By anxiety, I mean that I’m charging it a little more than once every 10 or 12 days, which is comparatively a lot. At first, I thought the drop in battery life might have been in my head, but Garmin’s projected average is right at 15 days. It’s a slight drop from the 16 days of the Fenix 8 and a much steeper dip from the 20 that the Forerunner 955 Solar was rated for, and I’ve yet to figure out if the benefits are worth the costs. The long run I detailed above zapped an astonishing 10% of my battery, which didn’t send me scurrying for a charger, but it made me think twice about the minimum charge I’ll run with.

On one hand, if you use your GPS watch more like an Apple Watch or a Galaxy Watch, relying heavily on the voice assistant and calling features — or if you’ve come from one of those smartwatches — you’ll probably be thrilled. You’ll feel right at home with regular charges, and you might just be happy with a watch that lasts several days.

As a runner, though, any drop in battery (however slight) feels like a red flag to me. I want my watch to last as long as possible to track as many runs as possible, and the Forerunner 970 doesn’t quite tick that box. I mean, it mostly does — I’d feel fine leaving for a weekend away with at least 50% charge — but I’d feel better knowing that glass half full would still be 35% full when I got home rather than somewhere around 20%.

Then again, this watch is doing things and tracking metrics that I never would have imagined, so maybe Garmin was always due for a slight settling in battery life. If I had it my way, I’d make a Forerunner 970 with a solar ring and a memory-in-pixel display like the one on the Enduro 3 just to see how much battery life I could squeeze out of it.

Despite that last-minute stumble — which, if we’re honest, feels like the story of every marathon I’ve ever run — I have no problem calling the Garmin Forerunner 970 my favorite road running watch. It builds on every flagship Forerunner before it, blending the AMOLED display of the Forerunner 965 with the microphone and speaker that made the Fenix 8 one of my favorite running watches. Garmin’s internals pull no punches, pairing a spot-on Elevate Gen 5 heart rate sensor with more than enough storage for months of activities, hours of songs, and longstanding conveniences like Garmin Pay (which I still cannot live without).

That said, there’s one more problem with Garmin’s never-ending quest to improve: The Forerunner 970 is very expensive. Well, it’s cheaper than the Fenix 8, but it now costs 50% more than the Forerunner 955 from just two generations ago. When that watch launched, I thought the $599 asking price for the solar model was more than fair — it lasted forever, put up with everything I asked of it, and still holds a pretty good charge even now, three years later.

Then, Garmin kept the $599 price tag for its AMOLED-toting Forerunner 965 but ditched the solar ring. I questioned it slightly, but ultimately accepted that the upgrades were enough to justify the new price. After all, the change in battery life wasn’t too significant, and the new display was miles ahead of the old memory-in-pixel face.

Now, though, the Forerunner 970 costs $749 for its singular 47mm configuration, which leaves me stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, I love that the new smartwatch-like additions make it a better alternative to the Apple Watch Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra — you can finally use your trusty GPS watch as your only wearable without much trouble. It looks gorgeous, feels refined, and tracks as accurately as ever… but I’m not sure there’s enough reason to buy one if you have a recent Garmin. The Fenix 8 is more adventurous, the Forerunner 965 is still just as accurate (and lasts longer), and the leap from the Instinct line to the Forerunner might be so great that it makes your head spin.

If I had to steer you towards an alternative, though, it would be the Fenix 8 ($999.99 at Amazon) that I love so much. Yes, it’s even more expensive than the Forerunner, but it packs a more resilient bezel, better battery life, and the same spot-on charging as this road-ready wearable. Honestly, the beefed-up bezel might be my main selling point — it makes the Fenix 8 feel ready for just about anything. I’m not afraid to take it trail running (where I’m notorious for a tumble or two), and it’s handled my love of climbing without a second thought.

For Garmin fans on a bit of a budget, the company recently added a Forerunner 570 ($549.99 at Amazon) to its running stable. It’s more affordable than the 970, but still packs a microphone and speaker for calling and quizzing smart assistants. The 570 does make a few confusing omissions like skipping Garmin’s ECG app despite having the Elevate Gen 5 heart rate sensor, but it gets the same adaptive training plans and advanced metrics, making it a worthy companion for just about all of your other fitness adventures.