The Garmin Forerunner 965 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are two of the best sports watches I’ve tested in years, and as an avid runner, they’re both packed with features that will come in handy during training and on race day.
To test their accuracy and usefulness in a race, I ran both in London’s Battersea Park Half Marathon last weekend, running a PB of 1:09.46. I checked the GPS tracks on both watches after the race and compared their distance to mile markers on the course during the event.
I also wore a Polar Verity Sense armband heart rate monitor. This allowed us to check the HR readings of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Garmin Forerunner 965, as we found reliable accuracy during our testing. Verity Sense had a Coros Pace 3 watch in his pocket to make it easier to get HR data for comparison after the race.
GPS accuracy
The race consisted of eight and three-quarter laps around the lower half of the park. It was a crowded event, so I had to run wide on all but the first loop, and in my experience, looped courses like this are always a challenge for GPS accuracy.
Both the Garmin Forerunner 965 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 ended up exceeding the official half marathon distance of 21.1km (13.11 miles), with the Apple Watch exceeding the official half marathon distance of 21.50km (13.35 miles) and the Garmin 21.23km (13.35 miles). 13.19 miles). The Apple Watch’s readings still seem a little high to me, even though I almost certainly ran longer than the official distance because I had to weave around people and take wide corners.
If you look at the GPS trace of the event, you’ll see that the Apple Watch turns wider and covers more distance than the Garmin in most corners when looking at the recorded loops. Judging from my memories of running races, I think the Apple Watch is better than the Garmin in some corners, but in some corners the Apple Watch seems to get more distance.
Overall, the Forerunner 965’s distance was pretty close to the officially measured race distance on the course, and despite the fact that it had to run a lot of time wide, the Garmin was a little better in this regard. I think it was accurate.
Heart rate accuracy
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 had some bad days in terms of heart rate, consistently showing much higher numbers than the Polar armband, and some stretches completely slowed my heart rate down. In contrast, the Garmin Forerunner 965 readings closely matched the armband readings throughout the race, with heart rate steadily increasing as fatigue increased.
As a result, Garmin’s average and max heart rate measurements are much closer to Polar Verity Sense’s measurements, and more so than the Apple Watch Ultra 2 if you were using HR to judge race effort. It would have been much more convenient.
That said, outside of this race, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has generally been fine when it comes to heart rate, and recently produced accurate graphs during a 10K race.
pacing
For this race, I used the Apple Watch Ultra 2 in Pacer mode. In this mode, you set a target pace or time and see how far you are ahead or behind that goal throughout the race. With a Garmin Forerunner 965, I used lap pace and manually timed my laps each time I passed the timing mats that mark the start/end of each lap in the park (approximately every 1.5 miles).
Pacer mode on the Apple Watch is great, and I’ve used it in the past when running marathons, where it was mostly accurate and helped me reach my goals. However, the distance my watch measured was longer than my half marathon distance, so it generously let me know how far ahead of my goal I was during the race.
For the main I had to ignore Pacer mode and instead use the Forerunner 965’s manual lap splitting and check my overall time against the mile markers on the course. Luckily, the math for my goal of breaking 1:10 was easy as it was 5. 20 per mile. The Forerunner 965 also ended up covering more distance, but I was able to use the Forerunner 965 to judge my pace on each lap, which helped me more than the Apple Watch Ultra 2 in this event.
verdict
There was a clear winner in this race, the Garmin Forerunner 965 was useful for pacing as it had more accurate heart rate and the total distance was closer to the official half marathon distance.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 was pretty good in terms of distance, considering I had to cover a lot of ground, but it had poor heart rate accuracy and was completely reliant on the usually excellent Pacer mode, which made it difficult to reach my goals. It wouldn’t have helped me achieve that.
