We may earn a commission from links on this page.
This past weekend I ran a 10K wearing both Garmin Forerunner 970 And Forerunner 165 musicAnd while I’ll do a full comparison soon, the experience made one thing immediately clear: sometimes it’s worth having a premium running watch. While both watches have great running features, the 970 has a few that the 165 lacks—and after putting them to use on race day, I can say that two of them in particular made a real difference.
Master your “race pace” with Garmin’s PacePro feature
I had never tested Garmin’s PacePro in actual race-day conditions before this weekend. The selling point of this feature is that it analyzes the elevation profile of your course and generates “dynamic pace guidance” based on both the terrain and your personal preferences. Before the race, you set a target time or pace in Garmin Connect, then tell the watch how you want to handle the hills—your options are to push harder on the uphills, use the downhills to recover, or aim for a negative split in the second half. On race day, the data field on your watch shows your target pace for the current split and how you’re tracking against it in real time.
I love PacePro because it takes the mental math out of racing. Instead of constantly doing speed calculations in your head, you can glance at your wrist and instantly know if you’re ahead, behind, or right on target. It’s like running with a coach who already knows the course.
To set up PacePro, proceed Garmin Connect > Training & Planning > PaceProChoose or create your course, enter your goal time and sync it to your watch before race day. The Forerunner 165 also supports Music PassPro, so this isn’t exclusive to the 970—but it’s still an undersung feature, and worth calling out.
Be specific with the suggested finish line reminder
This feature, which is on the 970 but not the 165 Music, is beloved by many Garmin runners—and for good reason: When you cross the finish line, you’re more focused on grabbing the banana than pressing the “stop” button on your watch. When, after 20 minutes, you realize that your watch is still recording, you’ve screwed up your stats. Congratulations, your 10K now says 10.8 miles, and your pace is completely off.
If you’ve loaded a course onto your compatible Garmin watch, the watch can detect when you’ve crossed the finish line and prompt you to trim your data to that point, even if you’ve forgotten to hit a stop. It’s one of those features that seems small until you need it, and then it feels like a lifesaver for your post-race data.
Fortunately, this feature works automatically once the course is activated. To make sure it works, you have to go to Garmin Connect app, choose “Race and Events,” And double check that your race is loaded onto your watch and ready to go before race day.
What do you think so far?
Ease your mind with “Auto Lap By Timing Gates”.
Credit: Meredith Dietz
This is the feature I’m most excited to talk about, and it’s exclusive to the Forerunner 970 (the 165 doesn’t have it). Here’s where it solves the problem: In any big city race, you weave through crowds, cut tangents imperfectly, and generally accumulate some extra distance that the GPS dutifully records. By mile three or four, the divisions on your watch may not line up perfectly with the mile markers on the course. You might think you’re running 9:00 pace, but the marker says something different, and now you’re doing mental gymnastics mid-race to figure out what’s real.
“Auto Lap by Timing Gates” solves this by triggering laps based on actual course mile or kilometer markers instead of GPS-measured distance. So when you pass a mile on the course, your watch logs a lap, regardless of how much GPS drift has accumulated. Your splits reflect the race as it was actually measured, not the slightly off version recorded by your GPS.
To enable this feature, you will need to go to Garmin Connect app and find your specific race under “Races and Events” Menu You can select an existing race by searching for a name or location or you can create your own event. Toggle on “Timing Gate” option, then specify whether you want to use miles or kilometers. On race day, you’ll start the official race as an activity on your watch, and in addition to displaying the actual distance run, your watch will automatically trigger laps when you pass predefined official course markers. This was not the race of the past Also It’s crowded, so I’m excited to test the facility during the popular Brooklyn Half-Marathon next weekend.
