Triathletes are always looking for an edge, and having one of the best triathlon watches on your wrist while you’re training and competing can help to push your performance and improve your recovery afterwards.
Triathlon watches aren’t plain old running watches - they have multi-sport tracking capabilities that are ideal for multi-event disciplines. They can offer useful feedback on your performance in every stage of training, monitoring your speed, distance, heart rate, and even the time it takes to transition between legs.
But these sports watches don’t stop there, they’re rugged pieces of equipment that can duplicate functions you’d expect from a smartphone. There's GPS tracking for precise positioning and maps, the ability to play music from the watch, and bright and vibrant OLED screens that mean a plain black and white watch face is now a thing of the past. With one of these watches, you don’t necessarily need to carry your phone when you go training, though there can be good safety reasons for having it nearby, and the watch manufacturers’ phone apps perform the number crunching required for performance analysis using an app that connects to the watch.
Multi-sport watches are ideal for triathlons, but they’re not limited to them. They can track much more than running, cycling and swimming, with modes for strength training and HIIT as well as pilates and yoga. They can also act as more typical smartwatches, giving you notifications from your phone when you receive calls or messages. They even tell the time.
The main limitation of sports-tracking watches is the same as for all smartwatches - they don’t last long between charges. This is slowly improving, but the small, slim casings of watches don’t leave much room for batteries, and the only way to make them last longer would be to make them thicker and heavier, which defeats the point. With this in mind, it’s a good idea to have your charger or a power bank with you if you’re going for a training weekend.
Best triathlon watches at a glance:
- Best overall: Garmin Fenix 8 - £869, John Lewis
- Best for a much cheaper choice: Polar Pacer Pro - £188, Amazon
- Best for an everyday watch: Apple Watch Ultra 2 - £799, Amazon
- Best for a premium option: Garmin Forerunner 965 - £499.99, Sigma Sports
- Best for a lightweight choice: Coros Pace 3 - £220, Amazon
- Best for long-distance adventures: Suunto Vertical Titanium Solar Canyon - £445, Amazon
- Best for an excellent all-rounder: Garmin Forerunner 265 - £321, Amazon
- Best for looking good while training: Polar Grit X2 Pro - £659, Amazon
Garmin Fenix 8
Best: overall
Garmin is a big name in sports tracking and its latest top-end watch, the Fenix 8, is an expensive choice, but also one that has every feature you need and some extra ones too. It comes in three sizes and has a battery that can last up to a month if you keep it in its basic smartwatch mode.
Switch on tracking and this will come down, but it’s worth it for the wealth of data it can provide. Race tracking, training, recovery, navigation and health information is displayed on a wonderfully bright AMOLED screen, and there's even a built-in torch for emergencies. It also supports offline music playback, contactless payments and a messenger app.
Buy now £869.00, Garmin
Polar Pacer Pro
Best for: a much cheaper choice
A great running watch at a reasonable price, the bright 45mm screen of the Polar Pace Pro can give you plenty of information on calories burned, hill climbing, location, performance, power exerted, heart rate and sleep tracking. It’s a very pure sports tracker, so it doesn’t do so well if worn as a standard smartwatch, but if it’s performance metrics and workout recommendations you’re looking for, it delivers the goods.
Buy now £188.00, Amazon
Apple Watch Ultra 2
Best for: an everyday watch
The Apple Watch is the archetypical smartwatch, and its Ultra variant offers a lot to the triathlete with multi-sports tracking and an improved battery life. It’s extremely versatile, with the ability to add and remove apps to tailor it to fit your training regime or lifestyle, and is rugged enough - with water resistance down to 100ATM - to survive whatever your sporting regime can throw at it.
It’s only available in a 49mm casing, which may be a bit large for some people, but the extra size means the AMOLED touchscreen is given more space to shine. Its training load feature sets a baseline for your activity, then grades your workouts from a mix of biometric data to give you an idea of how much effort you’re putting in and how you can improve.
Buy now £799.00, Amazon
Garmin Forerunner 965
Best for: a premium option
The 1.4-inch AMOLED screen of the Forerunner 965 is visible even in direct sunlight and does a good job of displaying data. The watch will run for three weeks on a charge if you keep it in smartwatch mode, which turns the screen off as much as possible and stops GPS logging, but if you’re logging your training it will keep going for about two days - this is actually a pretty good result as data collection can be hard on battery life.
The 965’s data display can be customised to your needs, and can display your route and location as well as metrics such as heart rate, hill climbing, distance to the finish line, post-training recovery and sleep tracking. It also supports the playback of downloaded music, so you don’t need a constant network connection for streaming tunes.
Buy now £499.99, Sigma Sports
Coros Pace 3
Best for: a lightweight choice
Offering over three weeks of battery life in smartwatch mode and an improved heart rate sensor over the previous model, the Coros Pace 3 can track running, cycling and swimming as well as winter sports and strength training.
It’s not integrated with music streaming services, but can play back MP3 files copied to its internal storage (which may be a bit of a niche feature, as hardly anyone has these any more), and can follow a GPS trail synced to your phone. It’s also a slimline watch, weighing only 30g, so it will suit athletes with smaller wrists.
Buy now £220.00, Amazon
Suunto Vertical Titanium Solar Canyon
Best for: long-distance adventures
This rugged outdoor watch offers solar charging so that it can keep going even when you’re away from wall sockets. This means it’s much less likely to conk out when you’re in the middle of a race or training session, and is especially useful if your tastes run to long-distance adventures that make triathlons look simple.
It can work offline, so there are on-board maps and navigation, an altimeter, barometer and compass, storm alerts and up to 85 hours of exercise tracking from a full charge. Switch off the power-draining features, and thanks to the solar panel, Suunto claims it can keep going for a year without needing to be charged.
Buy now £445.00, Amazon
Garmin Forerunner 265
Best for: an excellent all-rounder
A great balance of performance and price, the Forerunner 265 is a smaller watch than some of the others on this list, but still manages to pack an AMOLED touchscreen and can last for two weeks on a charge in smartwatch mode. You get decent water resistance for the swimming legs, a Gorilla Glass face for extra protection against knocks, and a large stop/start button that’s easy to use while wearing gloves.
There's music playing onboard, as well as navigation and plenty of fitness tracking options such as heart rate, VO2 max, exercise intensity, training readiness for data on recovery between sessions, and even weather and tide information.
Buy now £321.00, Amazon
Polar Grit X2 Pro
Best for: looking good while training
This tough but well-designed sports tracking watch looks great, but is perhaps a little high-priced against the competition. You get an AMOLED touchscreen covered in sapphire glass, and 100m water resistance.
The watch contains loads of sensors to provide data about how your training and racing are affecting your body, along with navigation, elevation measurement, sleep tracking, metrics dedicated to swimming and cycling as well as running, and a training programme which can set targets for your workouts. It can control your music playback too, and can last for up to ten days in smartwatch mode.
Buy now £659.00, Amazon
Verdict
If you’re a triathlete looking for a multisports tracker, then you have a lot of choices available to you. There are hundreds of watches on the market that will track your exertions, but only the best will turn that data into something useful so you can see your improvements and get suggestions for what to do next.
The Garmin Fenix 8 is expensive, but it deserves its place at the top of this list with its broad range of sensors and interpretive tools, while the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is more of an everyday watch that just happens to have a load of sports-tracking capabilities.
