How to Buy a Running Watch — What Features Runners Need

You are asking yourself how to buy a running watch? You may have a basic watch and wish to upgrade to something decent. You may be buying your first watch or you may be finding that your current timepiece doesn’t cut it for the type of running you are doing.

Runners who are buying a running watch are somewhat spoiled for choice, in an ever growing market of sports timepieces. Most sports watches, for all intent and purpose, look like great running watches and it is only when you test it out that you find if it is really suitable or not.

We tend to be wowed by the best looking watches, even if the features are suitable for runners. We may simply not know what features we should be looking for, yet without this knowledge we risk investing in a watch model that does not actually match their needs, so before you start shopping around, it is helpful then to take a look at features that are useful to runners other than a basic stopwatch timer.

First, you will likely need a watch with running features if most of the following points describe your activities:

1) You run competitively in races and are striving to run faster
2) You do several longer runs a week, over 30 minutes
3) You keep a running or fitness journal; and
4) At least some time, you perform some form of repetition or interval training.

If you only want to jog a few times a week for fitness, you do not need any more running features than a stop watch and possibly multi-session history, but this is optional. You should be able to comfortably get by with a cheap $10–20 sports watch with a basic chronograph timer.

Those who do more than just a few runs, can benefit from some of the more advanced features mentioned in the rest of the article.

Perhaps your most vital requirement is a watch face with digits displays that are clearly view able at arm’s length. One of the important qualities in a sports watch is that you can view your watch digits clearly while you are running.

Secondly you will need a way of recording individual repetition and recovery times when training over a fixed distance such as 200 meters. There are two basic mechanisms of logging times in a sports watch. Lap/split time logging over one session and multi session logging.