Why the Suunto Race has scored a place on my wrist – and in my heart

For years, if not decades, Garmin was my absolute go-to for sports watches and GPS devices. Although I certainly recognised Suunto’s merits as a diving watch manufacturer, I wasn’t convinced by its sports watches. Even the Suunto Vertical, whose launch was met with loud fanfare, fell short of my expectations.

Then, the Race came along. Not only did it win a place on my wrist, it eventually scored one in my heart too. Mind you, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. But more on that later. All in all, however, Suunto has created a powerful sports watch with a wealth of useful features.

First impressions: bright, lightweight and well made

The 1.43-inch (49-millimetre) touchscreen immediately catches your eye. As an AMOLED display – or «active matrix organic light emitting diode» display – it’s bright and razor sharp.

The colours are punchy and the screen’s easy to read, even in direct sunlight. This puts it a cut above the Suunto Vertical and its not-quite-so-brilliant MIP (Memory-in-Pixel) display. Thanks to sapphire crystal glass, the Race is mostly protected from scratches.

I’m testing the titanium model, which tips the scales at 69 grammes. There’s also an 83-gramme stainless steel model, which, although slightly heavier, is also cheaper.

The titanium watch is so lightweight and comfortable to wear that over the first few days, I find myself checking my wrist several times to see if I’ve even put it on. Despite its light weight, the Race is well made and robust, but not too clunky. It’s the size of watch I like wearing on a day-to-day basis too.

The Race comes with a black 22-millimetre silicone strap that buckles up with a simple click mechanism. Since it has multiple perforations, the strap’s super stretchy and doesn’t cause a build-up of heat. A silicone strap like this is ideal for multi-sport athletes who swim a lot. If the black one’s too boring for you, you can swap it out for a colourful variety. Alternatively, other manufacturers offer all kinds of watch straps made from other materials, from fabric to titanium.

Simple, intuitive controls

One thing that bugged me about the Suunto Vertical was the controls. I just couldn’t get to grips with them. With the Race, however, it’s a totally different story. The menu navigation is intuitive, allowing you to flick through it using either the touchscreen or the buttons on the right-hand side of the watch. Two physical buttons and a digital crown allow you to scroll up and down the menu.

One thing I’m particularly fond of is the fact that, unlike the Vertical, the Race has a simple back button. What’s more, I can choose whether to use the touchscreen or the crown. Swiping up takes me to the widgets, while swiping down takes me to the sports. Twisting the crown does the same thing.

With 95 pre-installed sports, there’s almost every form of exercise your heart could desire – from aerobics to circuit training. Typical favourites such as mountain biking, triathlon, mountaineering and ski touring are included too, of course. There’s even a snorkelling program complete with depth measurement (a nod to Suunto’s expertise in diving).

A range of health- and everyday features

As well as boasting sports features, the watch also displays weather data, tracks your sleep, counts your steps, pairs with your phone, displays your messages and can be used to control music- and podcast playback.

However, it can’t store music, and it’s lacking smartwatch features such as contactless payment. For me, that’s no big deal. At the end of the day, I want a watch to help me plan and monitor my workouts and support me with navigation and route selection.

Put to the test: loads of plus points, some room for improvement

I opted to test the watch at my first race of the season, the 23-kilometre Les Courses du Mont Terrible in Jura, Switzerland. Naturally, I also tried it out in Mallorca, where I was training in advance of the big event.

Even during my first training session, I was impressed by how easy it was to read the display and work the controls. That being said, I’d initially set the watch face only to light up when I moved my arm.

As it turned out, this was too much of a faff – there was always a slight delay, meaning I couldn’t check my key measurements with just a casual glance. However, changing my settings to «display always on» resolved the issue.

Good battery life – even on multi-day runs and hikes

Of course, having the display constantly lit up drains the battery. Even so, the Race offers great battery life, holding out for about 12 days during everyday use. When recording exercises in Performance Mode on the most accurate GPS setting, you get about 40 hours of battery. More than enough for all the non-stop sporting activities I’ve got coming up.

If you’re going to be out and about for longer, you can always switch the watch to the less accurate Ultra or Tour Mode to save battery. For my 23-kilometre run, I kept the display switched on all the time so that I’d always be able to check the route. With my environment switching between blazing sunlight and shady forests, I was really happy with how easy it was to read the data despite the changing conditions.

Mixed picture when it comes to performance data

As with any sports-watch-and-app combo, Suunto needed to collect some data and establish a baseline for load and recovery first. With this in mind, I wasn’t particularly surprised when the watch suggested a recovery time of several days after an initial, leisurely training run. After about two weeks, things evened out and the data on training load and recovery was largely correct.

My lactate threshold and V̇O₂ max (maximum oxygen uptake per kilogramme of body weight) were in line with the lab results I’d received shortly beforehand. To me, this is a big deal – both lactate threshold and VO₂ max are important indicators in managing my training and measuring my progress.

On the flip side, there were significant discrepancies between the heart rate measurements recorded by the Race and the ones I took using a heart rate belt paired with a Garmin watch on my other wrist. The fact that measuring your pulse using an optical sensor on your wrist is inaccurate is nothing new. Consequently, I often recorded high outliers while exercising. If you train according to heart rate zones, you should pair your Suunto Race with a heart rate belt.

Inaccuracies also cropped up when measuring blood oxygen saturation. According to Suunto, my oxygen saturation kept slipping into the hazardous range of around 80 per cent. A control measurement with a pulse oximeter, however, revealed it to be a totally normal 98 per cent. Again, this discrepancy is down to the watch sensor using a light-based measurement technique and being placed on the wrist. With this in mind, I’ll be ignoring these measurements from now on.

Data analysis offers numerous options

The Suunto provides you with all sorts of interesting information, including the power in watts you generate while running, your training intensity and training load. If you run the same route several times, you can track your progress. The app tells you whether your training sessions are productive, letting you know if you’re working out too much and too heavily or too little and too gently. I haven’t really had any trouble with synchronising the watch with the app so far. There were just two days when the connection stuttered a bit, only working after I disconnected and reconnected the devices.

However, the data is only really useful if you’re familiar with the jargon used in Training Peaks, the Race’s training software. For instance, the watch displays your EPOC (Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption) and PTE (Peak Training Effect) after a run. Both of these figures indicate the intensity of the workout and its impact on your progress. Although the terms are explained in Suunto’s glossary, I would’ve preferred the information to be displayed in a more easily understandable way.

Putting this to one side, however, the data is correct. My PTE hit maximum level during my 23-kilometre race, reaching a score of 5. My EPOC of 918 also seems realistic, even if I don’t know what conclusion I’m supposed to draw from it. Besides the fact I’m in need of a good rest, that is. Proving more helpful, the Suunto app tells me my training has been productive. Exactly what I wanted to find out.

It’s a similar story when it comes to sleep data. The watch tells you how long you’ve slept and how much time you spent in each sleep phase. I like the fact that Suunto’s competitor, Garmin, gives you additional information on whether your sleep quality was good, satisfactory or poor. Granted, I usually know this myself when I wake up, but if there’s a watch monitoring my sleep anyway, I’d like to see a simple quality rating or baseline comparison.

I was slightly confused when it came to heart rate variability (HRV), a key measure of recovery. My HRV was above my weekly average for several days – a good sign. Despite this positive news, the watch informed me of it with a warning-style «Attention» message. I’d have preferred a notification to let me know I’d recovered well, so there’s room for improvement here too. Yes, the Suunto Coach program gives me notifications like that, but it’d be handier to get them on the watch.

If you already use software like Training Peaks or are a whizz when it comes to performance data, you won’t find fault with these minor sticking points. Still, Suunto could’ve provided a little more context and explanations when displaying the data.

That being said, a major plus in my book is the wide range of information the watch displays when I run. In addition to my pace, cadence, altitude and intensity zones, I can also look at my expected times for certain distances and the number of grammes of fat and carbohydrates I’ve burned.

Training Peaks workout plans can be transferred easily to your watch, meaning you have your structured training programme right there on your wrist. Of course, you can also create your own workouts or activate predefined intervals.

The navigation is spot-on

The navigation is one of the Race’s ultimate strong points. Paired with multi-band GPS, the watch’s bright display is ideal for following a route. To use the navigation, you need to download offline maps (the stainless steel version of the watch has 16 GB of storage, while the titanium has 32 GB). Ideally, you should do this somewhere with a stable Wi-Fi connection because the download takes a little while.

Before the real race in Switzerland, I wanted to run a few trails in Mallorca. Since I wasn’t familiar with the region, I used the Komoot app for inspiration when picking my routes. I was able to easily import the trails into the Suunto app in GPX format, where they were then beamed over to the watch. Operating the zoom using the watch crown or touchscreen, I was able to see every twist and turn in detail. That way, I was able to run in areas with poorly marked trails that were hard to distinguish from the tracks of a mountain goat with the naked eye. All without the risk of getting lost.

The real test came in the form of the «Les Courses du Mont Terrible» race in Jura, Switzerland. With the route forming a cloverleaf shape and intersecting with other trails, I was glad I could bring up the GPX file on my watch beforehand. An arrow pointed me in the right direction each time I had to choose a path at an intersection – something I had to do numerous times in order to run the right loop.

I actually would’ve found my way to the finish line without the navigation, as the race was brilliantly organised and the route markings on the course were clear. However, as I’ll soon be running a GPS-based race, the Tour d’Uetli, I’m glad I’ve already tested the navigation capabilities of the watch under safe conditions.

Whatever the situation, the Suunto Race’s navigation is a great feature, more than capable of going toe-to-toe with the GPS in more expensive watches.