By 
Price: $300
Type: Multisport GPS Watch
Battery Life: In two and a half months of testing, the watch needed to be charged only three times.
Simply put, the Coros Pace Multisport ($300, Amazon) is the long-lasting, simple GPS watch I didn’t know I was missing. Functional and practical, with built-in barometer and heart rate monitor, it delivers any running metric I'll ever need right there on my wrist.
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For years, I relied on the simplicity of a Garmin Forerunner 25—pace and distance were all I thought I needed. Last year, I tested the Timex Ironman GPS Watch (very light but not very accurate) and the Suunto Ambit 3 (hyper accurate but heavy). Coros has impressed me with its ability to fit the functionality I’ve grown accustomed to, along with an ever-updating roster of features, into a lightweight device that hugs my wrist, even in the sweatiest of conditions. (I have bony runner wrists, too, and this kind of fit is hard to come by).
Travel Without A Charger
We’ve all been there: You’re packing for a work trip or a weekend at the beach, putting together a bag of cords and cables to charge all the devices in your digital arsenal. Upon arrival, you discover you forgot your watch charger. With the Pace, you won’t have this problem. It took three weeks for me to get the watch below 20 percent battery, including over fifteen hours of active GPS. An hour-long run used approximately 6 percent of the lithium-ion battery; a three-hour bike ride ate up 10 percent.
On the rare occasion it does require a full charge, it takes about two hours. A four prong connector is included in the packaging.
As Simple or Complex As You Desire
I do plenty of my running in the sunless early morning hours. I cannot count the amount of times I have accidentally stopped my run or hit the lap button while fumbling for the backlight. The Pace’s display screen lights up automatically as you turn your wrist. This helps in low-light situations and opens up the four buttons for other functions, like scrolling through pace, elevation, and heart rate displays.
You can select up to five display screens, allowing you to get as much or little out of the Pace as you feel comfortable with. These data screens can be customized to display up to four metrics, meaning you could scroll through 20 of the 27 possible metrics on your run.
In all but one of my dozen tests, the GPS satellite registered within 15 seconds; the only time I had an issue was in a heavily wooded area. A restart of the watch allowed it to get a satellite fix right away.
I found the GPS to be accurate in the suburbs and was delightfully surprised when it correctly tracked my route on a trail run under a thick canopy of leaves. City dwellers, however, will find their runs have the unfortunate wobbly scribbles they’re used to. I tested it during the Broad Street Run, a straight line through the heart of Philadelphia, and the only variants from the route were in a half mile section in the shadows of the city’s skyscrapers.
Phone Integration
The watch face is customizable, though you’ll need the corresponding Coros smartphone app (available for iOS and Android) to setup your in-run screens. The app itself is simple to navigate and instantly syncs with the watch via Bluetooth. Where other apps could have you waiting for a few minutes to fully download the data, the longest I had to wait was 10 seconds. If you are a Strava user, your run will be added to the platform the moment it transfers from the Pace.
The firmware is constantly being updated; one recent update added the ability to track VO2 max levels and was downloaded onto my watch through a Bluetooth connection.
If you run with your phone in an arm strap or in your hydration pack, you can set up the watch to display notifications from your phone. You can’t respond but it’s a nice option for anyone who is expecting a message from home or work.
Improvements for Next Time
Of course, nothing in this world is truly perfect. The Coros’ default settings is metric, so us American runners have to go into the app to switch to imperial units. Once that’s done, you have to manually change the auto-lap setting to record in miles. You only have to do it once, but it’s still a task.
Another fault can be found in the indoor tracking feature. On two separate treadmill tests, each of four miles at a consistent eight-minute pace, my mile splits ranged between 10:10 and 10:28. Coros has since released updates for stride analysis, but at the end of the day, how often are you forgoing the on-screen tracking from the treadmill in favor of your watch?
It’s important to note the Pace is designed for multisport purposes, but for my wear-test only running and cycling were tested. There are also options for pool swim, open swim, and triathlon. Coros has also released smart cycling helmets with GPS. Our friends at Bicycling took a look at them back in January.
Since becoming a video producer for Runner’s World in 2014, Derek has captured such historic moments as Meb Keflezighi and Desiree Linden’s Boston victories and Amy Cragg’s win at the 2016 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, and Galen Rupp and Shalane Flanagan breaking the tape in Chicago and New York, respectively.
