Since launching its first sports watch in 2018, Coros has rapidly closed the gap with the biggest brands in the space in terms of hardware, making the lightest and most durable devices available.
When it comes to software, however, the Coros still lags behind Garmin’s best watches in terms of the number and depth of sports tracking, swimming and fitness monitoring features.
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These are the Speed Plan and Hill Alerts, which I think are a selection of the nine new Coros features to come, but there’s also a new weekly mileage widget and a hybrid exercise mode that looks perfect for Hyrox events.
Speed Strategy
The new Strategic Plan feature of Coros watches is similar to Garmin’s PacePro tool and can help you speed up races specifically using a strategy that accounts for the hills on the road, or a general approach like a bad split, where you get to the fastest during the race.
You can create a remote location policy, or choose a route from your library. In the first place, the tool is very simple – you choose a place, set the time you want to set, then you want to run at a sufficient speed, speed up everywhere, or start fast thinking about slowing down towards the end.
Your plan will be given split times based on these settings, which will show your clock throughout the race as well as an estimate of how far/ahead you are from your target time.
Using a route means that the app will provide target times for each section that takes into account the altitude involved, so it’s easy to run routes especially where you want to beat the overall time, but go up slowly and speed up on the flat and downhill sections.
The Pace Strategy tool is quick and easy to use, and I find it especially useful for an event like the Boston Marathon, where you have to advance your overall pace on the downhill before the downhill to account for the uphill sections later in the course.
Hill’s observations
Garmin’s ClimbPro app has always been one of my favorite sports watch features, so I’m excited to see the same thing coming to Coros watches with the Hill Alerts update.
This will analyze the route you follow on your watch, and display all the important uphill and downhill sections one by one, so you can see them in advance, and then get alerts when you reach them during your run.
These will show the climb or descent on your watch, including the colors of your route and how far up the hill you are, so you can judge your effort more accurately.
I find this feature very useful during long climbs especially, because with switchbacks and / or tree cover it is not unusual to see the peak ahead of you, so knowing how much there is to climb will mean you can pace yourself so you don’t run out of steam.
Some New Features
Another feature I’m looking forward to using from the update is the weekly distance widget, which only shows your running, cycling and swimming distance. I like to keep track of my running distance each week, especially when I’m training for a marathon.
For Hyrox enthusiasts, the new type of sports “hybrids” looks good, since it can track the different exercises you do during the event, and even automatically switch between channels, so that you can know your time and your performance in each channel to look at afterwards.
Other improvements include the option to set a passcode on your watch, and the ability to increase the font size of notifications.
All of these updates will start automatically in the Coros app soon, so it’s worth checking back from time to time to see if your watch is ready for an update.
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