Garmin Forerunner 970 In-Depth Review: Brillance at a Cost?

Like clockwork, two years later, we’ve got ourselves a new flagship Garmin Forerunner. Or in this case, two new Forerunners: The top-end Forerunner 970, and the mid-tier Forerunner 570. And relatively true to their historical releases, they’ve brought a blend of both new running-specific features, as well as new hardware updates. This time around adding the LED flashlight, a speaker & microphone, an ECG-capable heart rate sensor, new GNSS sensor, and a brighter display. Plus of course, the giant list of newly added features outlined in the next section. Oh, and yes, the price jumped a painful $150 more, up to a staggering $749, effectively a wash with that of the Fenix 8 currently on sale for $799.

Over nearly past month I’ve been putting the watch through its paces across a boatload of workouts. From 50KM runs to epic mountain rides, openwater swims, trails runs, and plenty more. All to see how well this watch performs in real life, and whether or not the new software features are useful…or just bloat. Further, I put the new sensors to the test to figure out here they work well, and where they fall short. Because, they do fall short in some areas. Same goes for the prickly topic of battery life on the Forerunner 970, which saw decreases in a handful of the battery specs (with increases in others).

Lastly, this is a media loaner from Garmin. I’ll shortly go out and buy my own for long-term usage purposes, then return this existing one. As always, I don’t accept advertising from any company I review, and no company sees my reviews before you do. So, if you found this review useful, consider becoming a DCR Supporter, which gets you an ad-free site, plus the behind-the-scenes video series between both myself (and my wife) on everything that happens in the DCR Sports Tech Cave/universe.

What’s New:

The Forerunner 970 is the successor to the Forerunner 965, but in many ways, it continues with the tradition of pulling features of the Fenix series (aka the plastic Fenix), in this case, many of the Fenix 8’s features were added, both software as well as hardware. Still, if there’s anything we know about the Forerunner team, they don’t like being called the plastic Fenix. As a result, they also introduced a number of new software features that will in turn be rolled over to the Fenix 8 over the coming months.

In any case, here’s all the differences compared to the Forerunner 965:

– Titanium Case is a 47mm case with a 1.4” AMOLED touchscreen display (same as before)
– Increased display cover to Sapphire Crystal (from Corning Gorilla Glass 3 DX)
– Increased display brightness substantially
– Added Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor (previous was Gen4)
– Added ECG (medically certified) & Skin Temperature Features
– Added speaker & microphone for calls (when connected to phone)
– Added LED flashlight (with both white & red LEDs)
– Watch slightly thinner than FR965 by 0.3mm
– Added Evening Report feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Voice Commands feature
– Added Skin temperature feature
– Added Past Ovulation estimates feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Running Tolerance feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Impact Load Factor (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Running Economy feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Step Speed loss feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added ‘Autolap by timing gates’ feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Suggested Finish line feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added projected race time predictor feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added Garmin triathlon coach feature (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added previous Forerunner migration feature (will migrate old watch settings)
– Added Large Font size option
– Added Focus Modes (as seen on Fenix 8)
– Added new Multisport Structured Workouts (new to Garmin entirely)
– Added 15 new sport profiles (see list below)
– Added Multiple Battery Power Mode Customizations (previously just a single mode)
– Adds support for up to 4 CIQ data fields concurrently (versus 2 previously)
– Switched to 1-second recording as the default (finally!!!!)
– Improved mapping clarity (the map style design)
– Improved Garmin Coach adaptive training (show more details on watch)
– Tweaked user interface to somewhat match updated Fenix 8 UI (with a Forerunner 965 slant on it)
– Lots of changes to battery specs (mostly increases, some decreases, see below)
– Increases price to $749USD (from $599USD)
– Slightly higher at 56g (compared to 53g before)

Here are the new sport profiles that are added:

Pool Triathlon, Brick, Rucking, Mobility, Adventure Race, Expedition, Obstacle Racing, Hunt, Fish, Horseback Riding, Fishing, Boat, Sail, Sail Race, Snorkel

When it comes to the battery specs, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. These are mostly increases, save the smartwatch mode and GPS-only modes. Here’s the table of claimed specs (I’ll cover real-world testing data in the review itself, at the end of the ‘Basics’ and ’Sports’ sections):

Smartwatch mode: Up to 15 days (965 was 23 days)
GPS-Only GNSS mode: Up to 26 hours (965 was 31 hours)
SatIQ (AutoSelect) GNSS mode: Up to 23 hours (965 was 22 hours)
All-Systems GNSS mode + Multi-Band: Up to 21 hours (965 was 19 hours)
GPS-Only GNSS mode with music: Up to 14 hours (965 was 10.5 hours)
SatIQ (AutoSelect) GNSS mode with music: Up to 13 hours (965 was 9.5 hours)
All-Systems GNSS mode + Multi-Band with music: Up to 12 hours (965 was 8.5 hours)

Got all that? Good. Let’s dive into things.

Complete Beginners Guide:

Now, before we get into this crazy long written review, note that I also have a full video beginners guide, which covers everything you need to know in terms of how to use the watch. That video isn’t so much a review per se, but more of an explainer (including where things do/don’t work), and tons and tons of tips. Here’s all the sections:

0:00 Quick Intro
0:38 Hardware Basics
1:25 Watch Faces & Widgets
6:53 Sleep Tracking & Breathing Variation
8:33 HRV Status (Heart Rate Variability)
10:47 Morning & Evening Reports
12:34 ECG Functionality
14:31 Flashlight (LED) Feature
16:30 AMOLED Display Options
18:25 Voice/Speaker/Mic/Calling Features
20:44 Sports Modes/Menus/Features
25:38 GPS/GNSS & Battery Life Options
27:33 Sensors & HR Broadcasting
30:55 Running Tolerance & Impact Load
32:00 Step Speed Loss & Running Economy
33:16 Projected Finish Time
34:17 Timing Gates (AutoLap)
37:28 Training Readiness & Acute Load
41:15 Training Status
43:33 Endurance Score & Hill Score
45:15 Navigation/Maps/Routing
48:23 NFC Payments (Garmin Pay)
49:27 Offline Music (Spotify/etc…)

Ok, with that, let’s get into the full written review!

The Basics:

In this section I’ll dive into all the basics of using the watch. Things like the screen (and battery), buttons, daily activity tracking, and more. Down lower I’ve got more detailed sections for voice/music/payments, as well as sports tracking, accuracy, and more.

Starting off with the screen/display, and buttons. The Forerunner 970 has five physical buttons, plus the touchscreen. As is the case on all of Garmin’s 5-button watches, you can use buttons or touchscreen for virtually any operation. You can disable the touchscreen if you want, or only use it for very specific things (or in certain modes). It’s all hyper-customizable, down to the per-sport profile level.

The Forerunner 970 does have a substantially brighter display, which I’ll dive into the battery aspects of later in this section. However, by default it’ll be in a gesture-based configuration. This means that when you put your wrist down, the display turns off, and then as you raise it, it turns back on again. My preference though is so-called ‘Always-On’ mode, where it’s always on, but simply goes to a dimmed state when you put down your wrist (so you can always see the time). You can change this settings easily if you want, and it’s one of the first things I do.

Next, looking at the watch face, there’s a new default unique FR970 stock watch face (which Garmin already offers for $5 on their Connect IQ app store if other watch owners want it). This watch face is fully customizable, in terms of which data bits you stick on it. Likewise, you can choose from a pile of other stock watch faces, or gazillions of custom ones up on the Connect IQ App Store (most of which are free).

Heading down from there are the widget glances. These are the smaller tidbits of the larger widgets that pack in more information. You can tap on any given one to open up the full widget, with more pages of information.

You can tweak the list of widget glances as you see fit, including re-ordering them, adding new ones, getting rid of ones, sticking them in custom folder names, etc…

When it comes to sleep data, you’ll see your sleep stats automatically. This includes the time you fell asleep and woke up, as well as sleep stage/phase information. Additionally, naps will automatically be tracked. In terms of the times feel asleep/woke-up, that’s been spot on for all my nights. Even including mornings where I was up briefly and went back to sleep, marking the back to sleep portion correctly as part of the full night’s sleep.

As always, I don’t grade the accuracy of sleep phase/stage data, because there aren’t really any accurate ways to do that. Even so-called gold-standard devices in this realm are only in the mid-80% accuracy range, which is a pretty low bar to grade something by. I’d never grade heart rate or power data by a reference that was wrong 20% of the time. Thus, in the case of sleep phase/stage data, I’m just gonna assume it’s all ‘blah’ at best.

One of the new metrics on the Forerunner 970 is ‘breathing disturbances’, which is essentially being positioned as a non-medical variant of sleep apnea monitoring. Many of their competitors are already doing proper medical grade sleep apnea detection and logging, but not Garmin. I’m going to take a guess that they’re probably working on it. In the meantime, you get this little chart (showing nothing in my case, though I have seen it show one block once or twice at the bottom):

In order to enable this you’ll need to enable PulseOx (blood oxygen tracking), which historically has burned a boatload of battery (as in, you might as well charge your watch every other day). But with changes, it’s actually a non-event battery-wise now. I tested this on back to back nights, and here’s what I found:

With PulseOx/Breathing Variations Enabled:

Battery at 1:16AM: 89%
Battery at 8:18AM: 86%

Thus 3% decrease for those enabled during sleep mode.

With PulseOx/Breathing Variations Disabled:

Battery at 12:00AM: 55%
Battery at 8:20AM: 52%

Interestingly, also, 3% decrease without it enabled.

Meanwhile, as for that sleep disturbance data, I can’t really validate that either against any sort of machine/other device. You can also see your data in Garmin Connect afterwards (a few other nights showing a tiny bit of data):

Note that this data, and all other heart rate related/derived data is coming from the Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical heart rate sensor on the FR970. This sensor is found on the Fenix 7 Pro, Fenix 8, Venu 3, and other newer devices, and the first time we’ve seen it on a Forerunner device (along with the Forerunner 570):

One of the features of this sensor is the ability to do a medical grade ECG, for Afib detection. Unlike the breathing disturbances bit above, this piece is actually certified as a medical device by the FDA, EU, and other regulatory bodies. More on that process and study data here. To do an ECG, you’ll need to go through a super-quick set of questions and confirmations on the Garmin Connect app (and be within one of the many supported countries).

Then, it’ll do a test reading, explaining how it works. From that point forward, you’ve unlocked the feature to use anywhere globally (even outside your initial supported country). The process takes 30 seconds to do the reading, and is done by placing your other hand on the bezel of the watch.

You can then see the data afterwards in Garmin Connect as well, including exporting as a PDF:

It’s notable that while both the Forerunner 570 & Forerunner 970 have the Gen5 sensor, the Forerunner 570 lacks three specific things that are required for ECG. They are: No metal pads on bottom of optical HR sensor (for contact points), no wire internally leading to the bezel (to complete the measurement circuit), and no titanium bezel (aluminum isn’t a strong enough conductor here). Thus why it has a Gen5 optical HR sensor, but not ECG.

Next, in terms of basic smartwatch features, the Forerunner 970 does have the ability to see/receive smartphone notifications if your phone is within range (including emoji). In the case of Android, this also means showing imagery/photos in the text messages, and responding to text messages. However, in the case of iOS, you’re unable to respond to messages on the watch, or see photos, due to Apple restrictions on 3rd party smartwatches (the Apple Watch is permitted to do both).

Now, let’s talk battery (and display). The Forerunner 970 has a substantially brighter display than the Forerunner 965 did. While I found the FR965 display perfectly fine (even in the brightest conditions), it’s clear that other companies (namely Apple) were pushing up the display brightness, and Garmin would have to follow. Albeit, Garmin rarely discloses screen nit specs (for reasons that make no sense, as every other company does), the Forerunner 965 is assumed to be a 1,000 nit display. My assumption here is the Forerunner 970 is either a 1,500 nit or 2,000 nit display.

(Left to right: Forerunner 265, Forerunner 570, Forerunner 970, Forerunner 965)

Now, Garmin clearly wants to show off that brightness, and thus the default setting for brightness is 2/3rds max brightness (meaning, they still aren’t even using all the brightness in a default setting):

However, in my testing, with changing to Always-on Display (versus gesture-based display), one burns through the battery is astonishing speed. Like, 2.5 days. Not kidding. Typically speaking for always-on display with 1-3hrs of GPS workouts per day, for most of Garmin’s 1,000 nit display watches in the 45-47mm range, I was getting 4-6 days of battery life. In this case, again…2.5 days. Ouch.

But the good news is that you can go down to the 1/3rd brightness setting, and the world is good again. Even more, that brightness setting is still plenty bright in all my testing. In fact, I’d argue (very strongly), Garmin needs to redefine their levels here, perhaps in to four brightness levels (25/50/75/100%), because right now they’re just burning waaaay too much battery for no obvious reason. Oh, and I’ll cover GPS battery burn later in the sports section.

Ok, let’s move right into another piece of new hardware – the speaker/microphone.

Voice, Music, and Payments:

The Forerunner 970 gained both a speaker and microphone as part of its hardware upgrades. This enables you to take calls from the wrist, have a voice assistant, and otherwise chitter-chat with your watch. At least, if your phone is within Bluetooth range. That’s because the FR970 doesn’t have cellular built-in, thus it still needs your phone for that connection. In terms of the speaker, it’s notable that previous Garmin Forerunner watches had a beeper (capable of all sorts of chirps), but not a true speaker (capable of voice).

Starting off with the calling features, you can both receive a call directly to the wrist, answering it using the speaker/mic on the watch:

(Ironically, while shooting the photos in this section, the watch would crash every single time the microphone triggered on in all of these bits, a split second after most of these photos were taken. I hadn’t previously had crashes in any of these features over the last month, nor, later on the same day. However, I could do no right while trying to take the photos in this section, with constant device crashes. Garmin is looking into it.)

Likewise, you can also make outbound calls using either a contacts book, or, dialing phone numbers old-school style (for all 4 of you that actually know your friends phone numbers by heart):

The speaker quality here seems better than the Venu 3 and Fenix 8. It’s not clear if this is because the case materials are different, or if Garmin has actually improved the hardware here. Either way, it certainly sounds better than previous Garmin units. Still, I’m hardly a ‘talk to my wrist’ kinda guy. Just not my cup of tea – but you do whatever makes you happy.

Next, that speaker can also be used for asking your watch various questions to your digital assistant. This means on Apple phones it leverages your phone’s Siri, on Google phones it leverages Google Assistant, and on Samsung phones you can also use Bixby. You can audibly ask your watch a question, and then it’ll respond with the result:

Likewise, Garmin also has integration built-in, to do certain Garmin watch-specific tasks, like asking it to open up a run, or check your heart rate, etc… This feature is called Voice Command, and is different from the above ‘Phone Assistant’ feature.

Now, it’s worthwhile noting that while the Fenix 8 also has one more voice feature, voice notes, the Forerunner 970 lacks that. The Fenix 8 allows you to make little voice memo’s/notes that you can check/listen to later (such as making a voice memo during a run). But the Forerunner 970 lacks that feature.

Next, switching to music, the Forerunner 970 has onboard storage for offline music. That can be everything from your own MP3’s, to downloaded music from Spotify, Amazon Music, and others. In fact, with the speaker, you can actually listen to music directly from your wrist without any Bluetooth headphones. Normally, you’d pair up headphones first, but here, you don’t have to.

Certainly, if in a public space like a gym, I wouldn’t recommend doing this. But if you’re just looking to burn the crap out of your watches battery in the comfort of your backyard with subpar audio volume, then go forth. Otherwise, you can be a normal human and simply pair up Bluetooth headphones and listen that way instead. I’ve done that with the Apple AirPods Pro 2 on a few different runs without any issues in terms of dropouts or such.

Otherwise, all the music features are identical to before on previous Garmin watches over the last many years.

Finally, there’s contactless payments. As with almost all other Garmin watches, the Forerunner 970 supports contactless payments (NFC), assuming your bank supports Garmin Pay. You can find the bank list here. As always, it’ll vary based on which country you’re in, and which banks Garmin has partnered with. The coverage is very solid in the US, but mixed elsewhere. However, slowly but surely Garmin does add more and more banks, so definitely double-check the list first.

After setting it up (only takes a couple minutes), then to make a payment you can open up the controls panel and select the credit card icon. It’ll confirm the passcode if you’ve recently taken the watch off your wrist, and then you’re good to tap/pay:

It’s pretty easy.

Likewise, I dive into all these three things in more details in my Forerunner 970 Beginners Guide video embedded towards the start of this review, showing how they work in real life, which is a bit more useful for the voice sections in particular.

Sports Tracking:

It’s pretty darn likely that if you’re buying a watch figuratively named to be “For Runner”, then you’re probably going to use it for sports. In this section I’ll dive into the sports features, though, I do pull out the newly introduced for running-specifically features in the next section.

To start a workout on the Forerunner 970, you’ll tap the upper right button. Here, you’ll have a list of your sport modes, which you can customize and re-arrange. This part of the user interface has been tweaked and now matches the Fenix 8 styling.

The Forerunner 970 gained a number of new sport profiles, specifically:

Pool Triathlon, Brick, Rucking, Mobility, Adventure Race, Expedition, Obstacle Racing, Hunt, Fish, Horseback Riding, Fishing, Boat, Sail, Sail Race, Snorkel

In total, it has also the following sport profiles:

Garmin FR970 Sport Modes:

Run, Track Mode, Virtual Run, Indoor Track, Trail Run, Adventure Race, Obstacle Racing, Bike, Bike Indoor, MTB, eBike, eMTB, CycloCross, Gravel Bike, Bike Commute, Bike Tour, Road Bike, BMX, Triathlon, Brick, Pool Triathlon, Strength, Cardio, Mobility, HIIT, Yoga, Pilates, Elliptical, Stair Stepper, Row Indoor, Climb Indoor, Bouldering, Floor Climb, Boxing,Mixed Martial Arts, Rucking, Mountaineering, Fish, Hunt, Disc Golf, Horseback, Expedition, Archery, Inline Skating, Snowboard, Backcountry Ski, Backcountry Snowboard, XC Classic Ski, XC Skate Ski, Snowshoe, Ice Skating, Snowmobile, SUP, Kayak, Row, Snorkel, Boat, Sail, Sail Race, Sail Expedition, Fish, Soccer/Football, American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Volleyball, Cricket, Lacrosse, Rugby, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Ultimate Disc, Tennis, Pickleball, Padel, Racquetball, Squash, Badminton, Table Tennis, Platform Tennis, ATV, Overland, Motocross, Motorcycle, Meditation, Breathwork, Track Me, Walk, Swimrun, Duathlon, Golf, Openwater Swim, Ski, Walk Indoor, Ultra Run, Jump Rope

The point of sport profiles is part categorization, and part sport-specific data. For example, stroke rate while Stand Up Paddleboarding, and cycling power while cycling, and automatic ski run count while skiing or snowboarding. In the last year or two, Garmin has significantly added more sport profiles purely for your categorization purposes. These don’t have sport-specific data (like baseball), but allow you to more easily categorize your time spent in each sport (rather than just logging it as ‘Other’).

In any case, we’ll pick running for now, simply to show how sport modes work. They all, more or less, have the same similar structure. Once opened up you’ll see the current GPS status (if an outside sport), as well as sensor status (if connected sensors apply).

Speaking of sensors, the Forerunner 970 supports the following types of sensors:

eBike, Extended Display, External HR, Foot Pod, Club Sensors, Headphones, inReach, Lights, Power, Radar, RD Pod, Shifting, Shimano Di2, Smart Trainer, Speed/Cadence, Tempe, DogTrack,

The one sensor type that’s been removed from native support is Muscle Oxygen sensors. These are still available with Connect IQ apps, and since the Forerunner 970 now supports up to 4 concurrent Connect IQ fields, this shouldn’t be an issue. Muscle oxygen sensors actually held a unique distinction in that they were the initial example sensor when Garmin first announced Connect IQ a decade ago. The idea was to show how a sensor type could start off as a 3rd party Connect IQ data field, then gain popularity and shift to being a natively supported sensor type. And indeed, that’s precisely what happened. Albeit, in this case, muscle oxygen sensors basically returned back to deep-niche status after companies like BSX collapsed. In any case, history lesson over…

Back in the sport settings page you can configure data pages, data fields, whether or not a structured workout is loaded, and a gazillion other settings.

While these have been re-arranged a bit, they’re largely all the same. Likewise, Garmin will show any workouts scheduled. These can be ones you manually placed on your calendar, ones a 3rd party platform like TrainingPeaks (and a coach) placed on your calendar, as well as any Daily Suggested Workouts (DSW). DSW workouts are ones that Garmin creates for running and cycling, automatically, to slowly increase your fitness levels. These workouts will vary each day, based on recent training history, sleep, activity, and more. It’ll literally cancel your hard interval session if you got 2 hours of sleep last night. It’s constantly adapting. Here’s an example of showing upcoming workout from the triathlon side:

But DSW workouts would be replaced by Garmin Coach workouts if you had setup a specific race on your Garmin Calendar, where it’ll aim to get you to that race (technically speaking it’s going to automatically change your workouts towards any running or cycling event on your calendar, even if you don’t setup the specific Garmin Coach running/cycling plan). In fact, with the Forerunner 970, it now supports triathlon-focused Garmin Coach workouts. Garmin Coach now allows you to create a triathlon training plan, and it’ll add swim/bike/workouts as needed:

Now, when it comes to data page and data field customization, you can have up to 8 data fields per page, and a gazillion custom data pages. I’m not sure if there is a specific limit of custom data pages, but more than you could ever want to have. That’s in addition to all the various semi-customizable data pages (e.g. virtual partner, map page, time page, etc…).

With all that sorted, let’s just hit start. At this point you’ll see your data pages as you set them up, and you can iterate through them by using the buttons, or touch if enabled.

You can pause/resume at any time, and also use ‘resume later’, in case you want to stop for a longer period of time (e.g. overnight, or a few hours, to save GPS power by turning off the GPS). Otherwise, all of this works as most GPS watches have more than 15 years. I’ve had no issues with GPS pace stability or anything else on-watch while running, riding, swimming, hiking, etc…

Next, when your workout has completed, you’ll get a slate of data pages with all sorts of summary stats. Here’s a few examples. There’s also even more information in Garmin Connect (mobile or desktop), with a gazillion more data pages/fields:

Meanwhile, Garmin also offers a pile of various training load and recovery metrics. Most of these remain unchanged from the Forerunner 965. This includes Training Readiness, Training Status, Acute Load, and more. I dive into how all of these work in the Forerunner 965 post, so I won’t re-hash them here too much. That said, if you’re coming from a much older Garmin device (e.g. a Forerunner 935 or 945), note that features like Training Status have evolved quite a bit in the last few years (and in turn, reduced the never-ending ‘Unproductive’ messages you probably previously got).

Essentially, Garmin broke out the two core aspects of training and recovery metrics into two main buckets:

– Training Readiness: This aims to figure out how ‘ready to train’ you are at any given minute in the day. This takes into account sleep, training load, recovery, HRV status, stress, and more. In short, this is looking at whether you should train today, rather than how well structured your training is. Think of this kinda like your best friend (or gut) saying “Dude, you got 2 hours of sleep last night and ran a long run yesterday, just take a break today, you know you should.”

– Training Status: This is more about whether or not your training is actually going to make you faster, or, increase your risk for injury. Think of this more aligned to what a traditional coach would do, in terms of looking at your total training diet (e.g. intervals vs easy workouts vs long steady workouts), and seeing if that blend makes sense. And then moreover, whether or not your recent training seems to actually be paying off or not. The only caveat here being Garmin doesn’t take into account future goals here, so it doesn’t really know that you’re in the middle of a training camp or such.

In general, I find the change Garmin made about 2.5 years ago for the Fenix 7 (when they revamped all of these) has made a massive difference. These days, if you’re getting an ‘Unproductive’ message, you probably deserve it. With rare exception, it typically means you’ve vastly ramped up training load well beyond your norms, and concurrently have probably spiked your HRV values (usually indicating poor recovery in some capacity).

There are always exceptions, but between myself and my wife, in the rare times we’ve unlocked ‘Unproductive’, both of us would agree said training was probably indeed legit unproductive towards training goals (even if still fun!).

Ok, switching to a different type of burnout, let’s wrap-up with battery burn stats. Here’s an example while riding (with optical HR sensor, power meter paired, and LiveTrack enabled), where it gets the claimed 23 hours of battery life:

What’s notable about the above is that I had all the default brightness settings on, which means a substantially brighter backlight than required, and far higher battery burn as a result.

For fun, on a 4hr hike this past Friday, I turned down the brightness to the lowest levels (still brighter than a Fenix 8, for reference), and with full navigation enabled (with route loaded including ClimbPro) got 30 hours with optical, SatIQ, and still LiveTrack:

I suspect if I were to disable route navigation entirely, leave it at the lowered brightness level, I’d get even higher (likely substantially higher).

Either way, the battery in these common GPS modes is exceeding that of the Forerunner 965, which is the main point.

New Running Features:

There’s a few new running-specific features on the Forerunner 970 that I think are worth diving into more specifically. I expect these will become the new norm on other other end devices shortly, so, might as well dive into them here. They are as follows:

– Running Tolerance feature
– Impact Load Factor
– Running Economy (requires HRM-600)
– Step Speed Loss (requires HRM-600)
– Autolap by Timing Gates
– Suggested Finish Line
– Projected Race Time Predictor Feature

Some of these are quick and easy, while others are a bit more complicated. So, let’s dive into the easiest ones first, and then get into the more complex ones as we go along.

Projected Race Time Feature: First up, is ‘Projected Race Time’ feature. This feature is specifically used in conjunction with races you’ve placed on your Garmin calendar/race calendar. Meaning, you’ve added the race, which includes the date/time and race details (such as distance/exact course, etc…). This also triggers Garmin to develop training plans for the race (as it has for years), but we’ll set that piece aside for the purposes of this conversation.

Instead, for this particular feature, it now shows you your predicted finish time in a blue tunnel, showing a bit of a range, assuming you continue to train as you are. Basically, this shows you what’s possible with your current training, or, what’s not possible. Here’s an example of a half-marathon I stuck on the schedule:

Now, as with many of Garmin’s metrics, this requires you complete varying intensity workouts to get the most accurate results. That includes easy runs, long runs, painful intervals, etc… The more data types, the better it is at predicting. Lately, my running died hasn’t included a ton of super-high intensity (want to die) intervals, so that upper-end is mostly missing. Just the way my recent training has gone. Thus, I’d say at the moment Garmin is underestimating me ability, which I’d guess is probably in the 1:25-1:27 half marathon time, roughly. Additionally, a fall half marathon is substantially cooler than the hot summer temps I’m running in, which will help things considerably.

In any case, I think the feature is still well done, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it shifts as I give it better training data.

Suggested Finish Line Feature: Next up is the Suggested Finish Line feature. A perhaps better name for this feature would be “Automatic Race Trimming”, or “You didn’t remember to stop your watch at teh finish line” feature. This feature requires you have a course loaded for the race/route you’re running. Then, when you go to stop your watch, if it sees that your course (race) route actually ended some distance earlier, it’ll offer to trim all the time after the known finish line.

The idea here being you ran a race and then forgot to hit end at the finish line. Then, 45 minutes later while eating sliced oranges in a finisher tent, you look down and realize you never hit stop. When you hit stop now, it’ll say “Hey, do you want to trim all the time/distance since the finish line?”, and you can simply answer yes, and it’ll trim all that junk off.

Now, I’d argue this is pretty cool. But at the same time, you can already do this on Garmin Connect, which I feel would give you a much more exacting result, since you could really ensure everything is down to the second you stopped running (in case the finish line isn’t precisely where your route file thought it was). Still, I suppose that since Garmin already has the course file, they might as well offer to save you the time, and just knock it out then.

AutoLap By Timing Gate: Next, another feature requiring a course loaded, with is ‘AutoLap by Timing Gate’. This feature is also designed for races, and could also be better described as “Pace by course mile markers” or “Pace by course kilometer markers”, which is what it does. This solves the problem of big city marathons (or ones with poor GPS) where you do a lot crowd weaving, accumulating extra distance, resulting in your paces being offset from reality.

Because that weaving distance doesn’t matter to your final race time (which only cares about when you cross the finish line), it means if you follow pace splits on your watch, you’ll likely end up being slower than your goal race. By using this new feature, it instead gives you split paces based on predefined ‘Timing gates’ (aka mile markers). Thus, no matter how much wandering you did, your split is only going to happen when you pass the predefined mile marker (timing gate) on the course.

To enable this, you’ll need to go to Garmin Connect (on either desktop/web or smartphone app), and open up your course. You’ll see the ‘Timing Gate’ option on the left side, and then specify whether you want it in miles or kilometers.

(Note: If the kilometer markers/mile markers don’t automatically display on the map, you can toggle them on/off via the map later option in the upper right corner, under course points.)

Once that’s done, open it up on your watch. You’ll get a notice that this course has timing gates:

Then, while running, you’ll see a slightly tweaked split icon/page, when you cross these predefined mile markers, including showing your real-world pace between those two points, but also notably the actual distance you ran (1.01km in my case, versus the 1.00km on the official course):

What’s really notable here is on a 50KM run I did, with a course, there was a detour for…umm…a while. And in one case, said detour included a 3KM lap, because it ultimately never triggered until it found the next proper lap marker on the course. Pretty neat.

This feature is cool technically, but does seem a bit overthought. If we look at the free Garmin Connect IQ app called Race Screen that I wrote about nearly a decade ago, it does roughly this same concept, except you simply hit the button when you pass the mile marker on the course. The slight downside to that is if you screw up, you can’t undo. But Garmin’s ‘Lap Undo’ feature they added a year or so ago, would have solved for that.

Impact Load: Impact load is arguably the new metric that I think makes the most sense, and is probably the most useful. Essentially, Impact Load aims to figure out the ‘real’ cost of your run, in terms of relative distance. In other words, let’s pretend a steady 10KM run on perfectly flat ground has a corresponding baseline impact of 10KM. Next, we look at a run that has some steep ups, and more critically, steep downhill sections that slaughter your legs. That 10KM mountain run feels (to the legs) more like you did a 16-18KM run on flat ground. Essentially, it’s normalizing distance.

This concept is hardly new to training metrics. Metrics like GAP (Grade Adjusted Pace) has been around for many years, to normalize the ups and downs in terms of your pacing/efforts. And it only makes sense to apply it here as well. You’ll see the impact load listed for all runs at the end of the run:

Factors that can…umm…impact…the Impact Load are: terrain (hills), intensity (e.g. pace), and running form. All of which make sense, as again, if you run that 10KM very hard, it’s going to feel much different than 10KM easy, in part because your running form is different.

You can also see and compare these distance on Garmin Connect as well, showing the impact load for any given run.

And also see how it shifts during a run:

In all my runs, the Impact Load has seemed pretty darn close to what I’d expect. For some hard/fast paced, short runs with steep ups/downs, it clocked a much higher impact load value, which my legs agreed with the next morning. Likewise, for runs on near-flat conditions, the real vs impact load miles were pretty similar.

Again, out of all the metrics Garmin added here, this is probably the most useful one – at least in terms of justifying why your legs feel shot the next morning after that steep and fast descent out of the mountains.

Running Tolerance: Next, is Running Tolerance, which leans heavily on Impact Load. This metric looks how how much you’ve run recently (including this week), and determines your baseline, which it calls a ‘Running Tolerance’. The rough idea here isn’t much different than what coaches would do, in terms of determining your baseline mileage that your body can safely absorb without injury.

If you look at the Running Tolerance page, you’ll see three numbers (in either kilometers or miles, depending on how you setup your watch):

Acute Impact Load: This is showing the last 7-days of load, albeit weighted towards more recent runs (just like Acute Load)
Tolerance: This shows what Garmin thinks is your running tolerance
Actual 7D load: This shows your ‘pure’ mileage, non-impact loaded. So basically your actual ground mileage.

Now in theory, I think this is a good idea. But in practice, I’ve found in far too conservative. Admittedly, I’m a somewhat weird case in that I spend a fair bit of time across cycling, running, and swimming, but will often favor one sport or the other at certain times of the year. So recently, it’s been more heavily cycling, but then I got suckered into running a marathon (err…50KM run) one Tuesday, and so just did that. I had no problems going out for another run the morning after either. Thus my running tolerance is quite a bit higher than Garmin wants to give me credit for.

The last few weeks I’ve been running 70-90KM/week, but it’s only barely giving me a tolerance in the upper 30’s to low 40’s. Frankly, it should have scaled up faster than this. Sure, I can see how after the first big week it was like ‘Nah dog, you shouldn’t be doing this’. But at this point, catch-up Garmin, this is volume for me is no big deal. Of course, I also get that Garmin will always err on the side of injury prevention over mileage.

Running Economy & Step Speed Loss: I’m grouping these two together, because they go hand in hand. Can’t have one without the other. And both require use of Garmin’s HRM-600 external chest heart rate strap.

First up is Step Speed Loss, which aims to figure how how efficient your running stride is, specifically with respect to time (and thus speed) losses upon each foot strike. This manifests itself as a metric scored from 0-10, which is constantly changing (every second throughout the run), and you can see it as a realtime data field if you want to:

A higher number is worse, a lower number is better. You can pretty easily see this change throughout the run, especially if you change your stride a bit, or as you go up/down hills. At the end of the run, you’ll get an average score as well.

Garmin then takes this Step Speed Loss metric, and rolls it into Running Economy, which ostensibly tells how efficient you are as a runner. However, be warned this metric takes quite a number of runs to show up. In my case, it was about 7 runs and 115km of running, before it appeared. Further, Garmin stresses that they will ignore runs with significant elevation variations, and are primarily evaluating your form on easier and flat runs.

You can see this metric change (slightly) after each run, and then see a monthly chart of it as well (one dot per month).

The challenge I have with the Running Economy feature (aside from it requiring the HRM-600), is that it’s not obviously and clearly actionable as to how to make it go up/down. Even moreso, it effectively punishes me from doing harder interval runs, or trail runs, or runs with elevation. As none of those ‘count’ or are considered. Instead, it wants easy and steady runs. Not even so-much long runs at long run paces, as those too seem to impact it negatively.

Thus while the gamification part of my brain wants to get a better score, the reality part of my brain says ‘No, this is stupid, I’m gonna go do a 15KM trail run in the mountains, instead of a silly easy 45 minute run on perfectly flat ground’.

Whereas I contrast this to Impact Load, that makes an enormous amount of sense in my brain. I do an easy run on flat terrain, and my Impact Load matches my actual mileage. Whereas I do a strained hard interval run or run on challenging terrain, the Impact Load is much greater than actual mileage – but that’s how my legs feel. It’s the closest thing (and first time), we’ve ever seen Garmin attempt to capture muscular load.

Mapping & Navigation:

(Above: ClimbPro showing my total ascent left on this particular climb, using navigation/routing)

The Forerunner 970 has offline mapping, with downloaded maps for the region you bought it in (and free download maps for other regions around the world). These maps are so-called TopoActive maps, and include not just roads/trails/etc, but also topographic basemaps and points of interest. They are, by far, the most detailed maps out there for any watch brand on the market. The Forerunner 970 adopts some of the new mapping tweaks seen on the Fenix 8, mostly around the user interface. These are fairly minor, but it does add automatic recalculations for round-trip routes when you go off-course. Or at least, it’s supposed to. More on that in a minute.

But maps are only one piece of the puzzle. First up, there’s routes and navigation. The FR970 lets you download routes from your phone/computer, as well as wirelessly receive routes from other Garmin devices supporting Garmin Share (such as at a trailhead). And of course 3rd party platforms like Strava, Komoot, and RideWithGPS can also push routes to your watch too, automatically as soon as you create them. These all end up in Garmin Connect, where you can edit them if you want.

Once on your watch, you can load up a route and preview details about it. This can include not just the route and elevation profile, but automatic categorization of climbs, in Garmin’s ClimbPro. This is one of my favorite software features, and will automatically splice-up my longer hikes and all the individual climbs/descents. It’ll then show exactly how much distance/ascent is remaining, in real-time, to the top of the climb.

After starting a route, you’ll see the route on the map, and receive turn alerts as you approach a turn. If you go off-course, you’ll receive a warning that you’re off-course, though it won’t re-route you automatically. You can re-route if need be though, using the detailed maps onboard. All of this worked just fine for me. Likewise, you don’t have to create routes ahead of time. You can simply use the map and select a point off in the distance, or select a POI (point of interest) from the database, such as cafe’s, etc… Or, a GPS coordinate.

One such feature is round-trip routing, where it’ll create a course of your predetermined length, using heatmap/popularity route data. You can specify which direction you want this to go (West/East/North/South, or anywhere). And in general it does a pretty darn good job of creating really good routes that you actually want to go on.

However, the Forerunner 970, like the Fenix 8 before it, headlines a new feature that’ll automatically re-route you on the fly if you go off-course that round trip route. Let’s say you want to run a few hundred meters off to see an epic viewpoint or such. It’ll handle getting you back to the start with the new route.

Except, it doesn’t work.

In fact, not only did it not work, it outright kills off the entire route, immediately ending navigation entirely. I was able to replicate this on not just the Forerunner 970, but also the Fenix 8 (I had no issues with navigation/etc on the Fenix 8 otherwise, and in fact did all these tests concurrently with a Fenix 8 too). It seems sometime over the winter, the new re-routing feature of the round-trip routing has been failing, and Garmin failed to notice or fix it.

Given this is a headliner marketing feature of the Forerunner 970 that they highlighted, I was pretty perplexed into it not working. Not just not working, but failing spectacularly. So I went back to Garmin and asked for an explanation…and, they’re digging into why it failed, and have confirmed it can fail.

Now, setting aside the on-device round-trip-routing bug, everything else worked perfectly fine in terms of routing. And, I very rarely (virtually never) use the round-trip routing feature on the watch. I simply create almost all of my new routes on Strava, Komoot, or Garmin Connect before I head out. If I need to get back to a point, then I’ll do it on the watch itself, but that’s different than round-trip route (that’s simply called “Back to Start”, which also worked fine for me).

I will also note that the map render speeds though are pretty slow, especially compared to some of their competitors (especially the COROS Pace Pro). On one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, that’d be ignoring the fact that the Garmin map has absolute boatloads more data on it than all of their competitors. That extra data on the map comes in the form of heat map data, denser POI data, topographic shading data, and probably numerous other things I’m forgetting. You can indeed toggle map layers on/off, which will speed the rendering though.

GPS & Heart Rate Accuracy:

In this section I’ll look into the heart rate accuracy during workouts, as well as the GPS accuracy during workouts. These are compared to additional reference units during all workouts, typically 2-4 other GPS units, and typically 2-4 other heart rate sensors. Other heart rate sensors usually include a chest strap, and other optical heart rate sensors placed on the other wrist as well as upper armbands.

The Forerunner 970 contains both a new optical HR sensor (compared to the FR965), as well as a new GPS chipset (compared to the FR965). And in fact, we do see differences with both of these compared to the past.

Starting off with the easier trail run, and looking at the GPS track here, no obvious issues from any of the units:

So, then picking a section in the trees, again, looks solid (as I’d expect based on past history).

In looking at the rest of this run, there were no concerns in terms of GPS on the rest of the route, it was spot on.

Likewise, for a relatively boring run on a straight road no issues here:

Next, on the running side, we’ve got these 400m repeats. We can see the Forerunner 970 pretty much nailed all of these near perfectly – a substantial difference to the also just announced Polar Grit X2 that really struggled here (in purple).

But what we see above is pretty much spot-on in terms of Garmin’s Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor on most workouts, including interval runs.

Meanwhile, the GPS track accuracy was also good. This was simply doing loops on relatively open-sky roads.

Ok, so let’s look at an indoor cycling workout real quick, then an outdoor one. First, the indoor one:

As you can see, virtually spotless perfection here.

Next, moving outside. Again, you can see the Forerunner 970 is virtually identical to the chest strap, with only a few brief seconds it varied slightly. Note that the random dropouts you see there are not an HRM-600 issue, but rather a bug in that particular Edge 1050 firmware related to over-statuation of connections, alongside a secure channel HRM-600 connection. Garmin’s confirmed there’s a bug fix coming for that in the next firmware update.

As for GPS, at a high level, it looks good:

And then zooming all the way down into some of the mountain switchback sections, it too looks perfect, zero issues.

Lastly, let’s look at an openwater swim. In this case, I’ve done a few swims now with the Forerunner 970 on one wrist, and then rotating a few other watches on the other wrist. Here’s a look at the the most recent swim from a few days ago:

As you can see, compared to the reference track on a swim buoy, it’s not as good as I’m used to from Garmin’s watches in recent years. It seems to be struggling to re-acquire the signal after pausing to tread water (a test I do on all GPS watches for the last decade). Notably, the Polar Grit X2 struggled *FAR* more than the FR970, somehow making the FR970 look good.

Here’s a look at another swim, this one with the Forerunner 570 on the other wrist. As you can see, neither watch was perfect, though the FR570 edged it out slightly this time (likely just a case of dumb luck). This is definitely better than my more recent test, but equally, still has some mistakes I don’t tend to see with Garmin watches.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than all of their competitors are doing. As we saw recently with the Polar Grit X2, and I’ve on the Apple Watch Ultra 2, or the Suunto Run. But, it seems like there’s more tuning work to be done here on openwater swims (and in talking to Garmin about this, they’re going to start digging into what’s going on with my swims).

Setting aside aquatic adventures, the GPS & heart rate sensors are exactly what we’d expect in terms of being industry-leading on this watch. I’ve got roughly 30 different workout sets now on this watch, and all of them exhibit perfect or near-perfect land-based GPS tracks, with equally solid optical HR accuracy.

(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy portions were created using the DCR Analyzer tool.  It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, running power, GPS tracks and plenty more. You can use it as well for your own gadget comparisons, more details here.)

Wrap-Up:

True to Garmin’s form, this new top-end Forerunner isn’t a revolutionary upgrade. It’s exceptionally unusual for Garmin to do revolutionary upgrades of their devices. Instead, it’s evolutionary. It’s Garmin continuing to put the updated hardware puzzle pieces in place, one step at a time. From new speaker/mic, to an updated optical HR sensor, to updated GNSS systems, to the brightest display in a Garmin watch to date, and more. Likewise, adding in a slate of new software features that’ll soon roll out to other Garmin devices.

Some of these new software innovations are genuinely useful, specifically the running Impact Load, for example. Others seem specifically and solely designed to upsell you on their new $169 HRM-600 heart rate sensor, with the Running Economy and Step Speed Loss metrics. And unfortunately, those were the two least useful new features on the entire watch. I guess perhaps I should thank Garmin for not hiding the most useful features behind a secondary sensor paywall. I’m sure over time they’ll find other new watch features that require the HRM-600, just as they have in the past with the HRM-PRO & PRO-PLUS series of straps.

If we look at the hardware updates, the added flashlight is a huge inclusion that many people have been asking for. And the new display is genuinely brighter. The display brightness is kind of a factual thing that’s easy to see (no pun intended). But I also didn’t have any problems seeing the Forerunner 965 screen, even in bright sunny summer conditions. No doubt Garmin is simply aiming to keep up with Apple, Google, and others here, but left in the default brightness settings, it just burns too much battery. Thankfully it’s a 5-second tweak you can make to bright it down a notch, and basically double your battery life, back to Forerunner 965 standards. Of course, the updates to the Gen5 optical HR sensor are solid, as we already know, and aside from some mostly minor quibbles on openwater swim track accuracy, the GPS accuracy remains industry leading.

Ultimately, if you want the top-featured Garmin Forerunner, it’s gonna set you back nearly $800. For that price you’re paying for a deep bench of premium features, alongside premium hardware. That’s the core difference between this watch and watches half their price from their competitors. As always, whether or not you value those features or their premium nature is an individual decision.

With that – thanks for reading!