Review: Garmin Forerunner 970

Why, look at the leaves. It’s Garmin running watch season again! The sweatiest time of the year! As luck would have it, we’ve got a new flagship running watch to pore over in the form of the Forerunner 970.

It features Garmin’s brightest AMOLED screen yet, built-in maps, a flashlight, a speaker, a mic, and more data fields than most of us mere mortals can process. It also costs $150 more than the previous running flagship, the Forerunner 965. Let’s see if it’s worth it.

New Look

The Forerunner 970 is the high-end version of Garmin’s storied running watch line. It has a 1.4-inch AMOLED touch display that is incredibly bright—it’s quite a bit brighter than my Fenix 8. New hardware includes a bright LED flashlight (three levels of white and one level of red), Garmin’s latest fifth-generation optical heart rate monitor, and a speaker and a mic for taking calls and interacting with the watch’s (or your phone’s) smart assistant.

It comes in three colorways—black, white and yellow, or gray and indigo—and features a sapphire crystal screen with a titanium bezel and a plastic body. It’s 12.9 mm thick and is waterproof to 50 meters.

All of those features work well. The screen arguably works too well, because if you have it cranked to full brightness it will put a significant dent in your battery life. I chose to keep mine at power level 1 (out of three) and found it plenty bright, even when running in indirect sunlight. I also chose to use the gesture-based screen waking, so the display is off until I look at it. Between those choices, I averaged about two weeks of battery life, depending on how much GPS-tracked activity I was doing. The watch gets 26 hours of GPS tracking per charge.

I can’t say enough good things about the external flashlight. It’s bright enough to find my way down a dark trail at night, but the red light is enough for me to make my way to an unfamiliar hotel bathroom without blinding myself. It also has a strobe mode which can provide additional visibility for night runners. The optical heart rate monitor is fantastic. I tested it against a chest strap on a couple of activities, and it matched just about perfectly, which is really impressive for a wrist-worn HRM. It has sensors for your pulse oximetry and skin temperature, and it can take manual ECG readings, which can help detect AFib.

The speaker and mic are nice additions. Sound quality isn't great, but it’s handy when I get an important call in the shower. More importantly, it allows you to interact with your phone’s voice assistant, and even when you aren’t connected to your phone it can understand a number of voice commands for specific features. This includes starting/stopping a specific activity, changing a setting on the watch, or starting a timer or stopwatch. It works well and can save a lot of menu navigation.

(Mostly) Sweet Software

Garmin makes the best software of any sports watch, and that holds true with the Forerunner 970. We don’t see any departures from the winning formula here. It still uses the same five-button navigation (plus touchscreen), it still has hundreds of downloadable watch faces, it still tracks a ton of 24/7 health metrics and a massive number of sports and activities (though not quite as many as the Fenix 8). There’s plenty of new stuff to pick through, though.

If you’ve used a Garmin watch from the past few years, you’re familiar with Morning Report, a breakdown you receive upon waking that details the quality of your sleep and recovery status, among other things. Now there is an Evening Report as well. This new report summarizes the day you just had, gives you recommendations as to how much sleep you should try to get, and offers a preview of your day tomorrow.

The Forerunner 970 does have some all-new training features. Most successful is the new Acute Impact Load data, which shows up for each run. Say you run three miles on flat ground at your normal pace. Garmin’s programming would say that is a regular three-mile run. But if those miles were super hilly, with brutal inclines and declines, it might say that that probably felt like 5 miles, which will factor into your recovery. I really love this feature, which seems to nail exactly how my runs felt.

All of that is then factored into your Running Tolerance score, where it takes your actual miles run over the last week, plus your Acute Impact Load miles, and then tells you how many weekly miles it thinks you can tolerate. If you’re training efficiently, hopefully this will steadily go up week by week. It estimated that my tolerance is 9 miles per week, which is probably about right. My watch doesn’t know that I have a long history of knee issues, which is why running isn’t my primary sport, so I’m hesitant to ramp up too quickly, because that’s when I get hurt. So, y’know, take your watch’s wisdom with a grain of salt.

Then there’s the new Step Speed Loss and Running Economy scores. While the Forerunner 970 is the only watch in Garmin’s lineup that can deliver these metrics (so far), it can’t do it alone. It needs the new Garmin HRM 600 chest strap heart rate monitor, which will cost an additional $170.

When you’re running, each time your foot hits the ground you slow down a little, hitting the brakes with every little landing. The Step Speed Loss measures exactly how much you slow down with each step, with the lower the number the better. Some of that is then factored into the Running Economy score, which makes some broader observations about your ground-contact time. (It takes a handful of runs with the HRM 600 before it’ll show up.) This is getting pretty into the weeds, so unless you’re an aspiring pro athlete, these metrics don’t do a whole lot for you. I’d probably skip the strap.

Then there are some cool race-specific features, like Projected Race Finish Time. If you punch in all the details for an upcoming race (real or theoretical) and use the watch to train, it will tell you what your estimated finish time would be if you ran it tomorrow. But also, if your race is three months away, it will estimate what your time will be if you keep training like you have been. You can also load the race course into your watch, so on the big day you can get more specific data. For instance, it might give you more accurate splits, and it can even automatically go back and give you a Suggested Finish if you run past the line and are too busy celebrating to remember to stop your watch.

Triathletes will be excited that you can now build a full tri training plan. You punch in the details about the race, and the days you do/don’t want to train, and it will build a whole training calendar for you, getting more intense as the race nears. It’s really quite advanced and, from what I can tell, very thorough. Years ago, I worked with Team in Training to prepare for the NYC Triathlon, and Garmin’s training plan looks pretty similar to the one I did then. If you’re going for a specific time, it will push you toward that too.

It has 15 new sport profiles compared to the Forerunner 965, including things like Backcountry Snowboarding, Pickleball, and even some motor sports. The list isn’t as extensive as the Fenix 8, though, which can track surfing and now works as a full-on dive watch for recreational scuba and freediving. It really feels like the lack is just to differentiate between the Forerunner and Fenix lines, because a software update could do it.

Fortunately, the map features have been cribbed from the Fenix 8, and they’re excellent. It comes with extensive topographical maps installed. The maps are colorful, bright, and easy to navigate by pinching and tapping. A new feature is Round Trip Routing, with corrections (theoretically). If you’re in an unfamiliar city, you can tell the watch that you want to do a 5-mile run and it will suggest a loop for you. If you accidentally take a wrong turn or see some pretty thing you want to go check out, it will fluidly reroute you to get you back to your hotel while hitting your goal distance (within reason, of course).

It’s such a great idea, but I could never get it to work. If I went off the route, the whole watch would crash, and I had to power cycle it. Hopefully this is something Garmin can fix in a future software update (the updates come roughly once a month). On the upside, I found GPS performance to be accurate, even among trees, cliffs, and tall buildings.

A Lot of Competition

It’s worth mentioning that Garmin also launched the new, midrange Forerunner 570. It has a shorter battery life, less-premium materials (Gorilla Glass 3 vs. Sapphire, aluminum bezel vs. titanium), less memory at 8 GB vs. 32 GB, no built-in mapping, and no flashlight. You get the speaker and mic though, and there’s the option of a 42 mm display instead of just 47 mm, which is nice for those with smaller wrists.

With all that said, a lot of these features are available on the Fenix 8. The Fenix 8 has more expensive materials, like a full titanium body; some of the same hardware, like the mic and speaker, and better battery life. There are some features that aren’t currently available, like Running Tolerance, but those are coming via a huge new software update that Garmin just announced.

The Fenix 8 is way more expensive than the Forerunner 970, but it's also much older. If the Fenix 8 goes on sale, as it occasionally does, it’s a no-brainer to get it instead. The Forerunner 970 is a premium watch with advanced features that will give you a lot of insight and assistance if you’re trying to go pro, but it might be overkill if you’re not and you occasionally like to surf instead.