The Coros Pace Pro might just make you reconsider buying that Garmin

If you can get any runner to stand still for long enough you’ll find that most of them are wearing Garmin watches to track their runs, but if you’d rather not follow the flock the new Coros Pace Pro should help make your 5K times as competitive as its price.

Thanks to a boost in processing power over the previous model Coros is calling the Pace Pro its “fastest watch ever”, so the 1.3in touchscreen should respond at high speed, even if your legs don’t.

The Pace Pro is also the first watch in Coros’s range to use AMOLED tech, so you get a 416×416 screen with 1500 nits of peak brightness – great for both checking your metrics mid-run and displaying full-colour maps.

As you’d expect GPS is onboard, and even with it turned on you’ll get up to 38 hours out of the battery (31 hours in dual-band mode, which should increase accuracy), but if you just use it for phone notifications and sleep tracking that increases to 20 days (or 28 hours and six days respectively if you use the screen’s always-on mode).

Other sensors include heart rate, pulse ox for SpO2, an electrocardiogram, and thermometer for your body, plus a barometric altimeter, accelerometer, gyroscope and 3D compass.

With all of this packed inside you might think the Coros Pace Pro would be a chunky little lump, but if you fit it with a nylon band (£24 extra) it weighs just 37g. Even with the standard silicone one attached it’s still only 49g, so neither of them should have a detrimental effect on your times.

Specs-wise the Pace Pro is comparable to Garmin’s Forerunner 965, which can be found for less but has an RRP of £600, while the Coros will only set you back £349/$349. It’s available in black, grey or blue.