The Garmin Forerunner 265/265s Made Me Feel Like a Serious Runner Again
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The Good
- Sharp AMOLED screen
- Physical buttons (including start/stop and lap buttons)
- Excellent location and heart rate tracking
- HRV and resting heart rate tracking
- VO2max and predictions for race times
- Customizable data screens during workouts
- Training readiness and training status scores
- Customized daily suggested workouts
- Excellent battery life
The Bad- Plastic case exterior looks cheap, even with different bands
- Clunky integration with your phone
- No extensive app store
Table of Contents
If you know me, you know that I never get too attached to my fitness tech. I’ll happily run without a watch of any kind; I know my body is what really registers the miles. But that all changed when I tested a Garmin Forerunner 265 and I fell in love. I now bring this watch—in its smaller format, the 265S—on every run I do.
I wore this watch for four months before beginning to write this review, during which time my opinion evolved from “nice watch, I guess” to “me and my BFF [this watch] are going to crush a race together.” I used its workout suggestions to train for a 5K—not my first ever, but my first in a long time—and I came shockingly close to setting an all-time PR. I found the metrics and the training suggestions helpful but not overbearing, and the watch itself is far more convenient to run with than your typical Apple or Pixel smartwatch.
The Forerunner 265, like many of its Garmin brethren, is designed for runners in a way that most smartwatches are not. It has physical buttons, so you can end your lap exactly at the right moment without even looking at the screen. It has tools for creating detailed workouts. It automatically detects your max heart rate and your lactate threshold. It can suggest custom workouts, whether you’ve bothered to set up a coaching plan or not. And it’s customizable enough that all of this gets out of your way if you don’t want to use it.
It’s rare for a gadget to walk the line of providing any data you want, without overwhelming you with all the data. Garmin is great at this, all across its ecosystem, and the Forerunner 265 combines that philosophy with a feature set that will delight most any runner, from casual to serious. It’s so built for runners that it has a default feature where you flick your finger upwards on the screen to see a prediction of how fast it thinks you could run a 5K.
Sizing: The 265 versus 265S
Before we go further, I want to clarify why the model name of Forerunner 265 will sometimes have an "S" after it. The 265 and 265S are the same watch, just in two different sizes—42 millimeters for the 265S, and 46 millimeters for the 265. I tested the 265 first, but when I bought a running watch for myself, I opted for the smaller 265S. In this review, I'm writing about both: The 265 is the white watch in my photos, and the 265S is the black one.
Most smartwatch makers would just have one model name and sell it in two sizes, but Garmin likes to split off their smaller sizes into a model with "S" at the end of the version number. I have a comparison here of the subtle differences between the two watches, but they are very subtle. The larger watch has a stronger-feeling vibration; the smaller watch gets 14 rather than 13 days of best-case battery life. The bottom line, though, is that you'll get the best experience and most accurate tracking from whichever size fits you better. My wrist is exactly 6 inches around, and I found the smaller watch to be a perfect fit.
How does the Forerunner 265 compare to other Garmin watches?
Garmin makes a lot of watches, including multiple tiers of Forerunner. I’ll give you the basic rundown: the Venu and Vivoactive are what you might call lifestyle smartwatches. The Lily is in the same vein, but smaller and cuter. If you want a general fitness watch, these are fine; but if you’re a runner, you probably want something sportier.
Runners will generally enjoy the Forerunner line, but if you do a lot of hiking and outdoorsy stuff, you might prefer the rugged (and, in some models, solar-powered) Instinct line. On the other hand, if you have a healthy budget and/or expensive hobbies, you may like the premium multisport watches in the Fenix line. These include extra features for mountain climbing and scuba diving, and also come in versions with solar panels and/or sapphire screens instead of glass.
When it comes to the Forerunner, the sweet spot for most serious and semi-serious runners is going to be the 265. On the lower end there is a Forerunner 55 that can track your runs and your sleep, but doesn’t give much in the way of fancy analytics. (It also has the older MIP screen.) On the higher end, there is a Forerunner 965 that has some extra metrics, like an Endurance score, and also has onboard maps.
And right in between those models—just under the Forerunner 265—there is a Forerunner 165 that would be a good pick for casual runners who aren't sure they need everything the 265 has to offer. The 165 has most of the features of the Forerunner 265, but it doesn't do multi-band GPS and it's missing the Training Readiness and Training Status features that a lot of runners enjoy (I would miss them for sure if I didn’t have it). It's also missing a few little things here and there, like some of the data screen layouts for looking at metrics during your run. On the other hand, it costs $200 less, so the tradeoffs may be worth it.
Out of the box
The Forerunner 265 box comes with the watch, and a charging cable that plugs into the back (proprietary connector on that end, USB-C on the other).
It has five buttons.
The right top button (START) starts or stops an activity. Press this when you’re ready to go for a run.
The right bottom button (BACK) is a lap button. You can also use it to exit out of any menu or screen.
The left top button (LIGHT) turns the screen on or off with a quick press. Long press it, and you’ll get a menu of shortcuts. The ones I use most often are the wallet for payments and the flashlight, but you can also access tools like a stopwatch or the “find my phone” feature.
The left middle (UP) and bottom (DOWN) buttons act as up and down arrows to scroll whatever is on the screen. Sometimes this is more convenient than using the touchscreen, and some workout modes lock the touchscreen anyway.
Long-press the left middle button, and you’ll get a menu that includes all your settings, and clock features like setting alarms or changing the watch face.
You can also set “hot key” shortcuts for other features. For example, I have it set so that long-pressing the left bottom button brings up the music controls.
Using the watch in everyday life
The first thing you'll notice, if you're switching to Garmin from another type of watch, is that the Forerunner watches have tons of features and settings, and you'll have no clue where to find them (or even that some of them exist). I've been using this watch in one form or another for most of a year, and I'm still finding features I didn't know were there. Give yourself a little time to get over the learning curve, though, and don't hesitate to look up answers to your questions. The user manual is extensive, and is linked from the Garmin Connect app. Conveniently, if you google a question and land on the Garmin website, there will usually be a widget at the top of the page where you can type in your model name and it will tell you whether or not the information on that page applies to you.
Watch faces
Like most smartwatches, you can choose a face with complications—little icons with data or shortcuts to tools. My favorite setup shows my weekly mileage and the time of the next sunrise or sunset, plus standard items like the date, battery level, and steps I’ve taken. This watch also predicts how many hours until I’m “recovered” from my last workout, so I have a complication for that too (even though I think it’s a slightly silly metric, I still like seeing it.)
The watch comes with 15 built-in faces, and you can create simple faces yourself with an app. There is also a ConnectIQ store where you can download or buy faces that developers have created. All that said, the choice of watch faces is nowhere near as extensive or as fun as what you might get on, say, an Apple Watch.
Glances
The most fun feature (in my opinion) is what you get when you scroll down from the main watch face: your “glances.” These are quick views of various stats. My VO2max and predicted 5K time are at the top of my stack of glances. Do I need to see these at any moment? Of course not. Do I think it’s fun to look at them? Absolutely.
My other glances include the weather, upcoming events from my calendar, races I’ve scheduled for later in the year, upcoming workouts, training readiness, HRV status, and more. (You can customize this list; there are tons to choose from.) Glances are handy for things you might want to briefly check on, but that you don’t want cluttering up your watch face. For each glance, you can tap on it to see more details (for example, for each upcoming race, the detailed view will tell you the date of that race, the likely weather at the start time, and a prediction for your finish time based on how your training has been going.)
Comfort
I tested the full-size 265, and honestly the only thing I didn't like about the comfort or fit was the size. (That's why I got the 265S later). I do appreciate that it seems to get perfectly good readings without being super tight. Most of the time, I wear it pretty loose, and even then, my data is consistent with what I get with a chest strap. (I do tighten it when running, though, just so that it doesn’t bounce around.)
The watch comes with a silicone strap, which isn’t as breathable as a fabric one, but I like that I can wash it in the shower, leave it on the sink to dry, and by the time I’ve dried myself off, the watch is dry as well.
Some people notice itching or irritation when wearing a watch 24/7. The watch even comes with instructions to consider switching wrists periodically. But even though I have sensitive skin, I never had an issue with this watch. I did notice some itching once, realized it had been a day or two since I’d washed it, and noticed some crud near the sensor. After a quick wash I was able to wear it again without any issues. And, like I said, I’ve worn this thing every day for four months. It gets my seal of approval. I've written more here about how to avoid irritation with smartwatch bands. As long as you keep the band clean and dry, you should be fine.
Display
The Forerunner 265 has an AMOLED display. It’s bright, crisp, and colorful. Until recently, Garmin’s watches used MIP screens. On forums like Reddit, I keep seeing Garmin devotees say that MIP screens are great in sunlight and they never want to switch to AMOLED.
But I don’t agree. I’ve done plenty of runs in blindingly sunny conditions, with and without sunglasses, and never once had an issue reading the screen. It was always bright and crisp, no matter what I was doing with it. One strange thing, though: I tried to take a photo of the screen one sunny day at the pool, and found that the photos came out looking dim. The screen was bright in real life, though. I wonder if the rumor of worse readability came about because of dim photos.
I wrote more here about the difference between MIP and AMOLED screens, and I took plenty of pictures—including a Garmin 265S next to a MIP screen watch. The old Forerunner 255 is still out there if you truly want a MIP watch with similar features, but most people will be happier with the smartphone-style AMOLED screen of the 265.
Commonly used features
Besides starting workouts, or just using the watch as a timepiece, I don’t find myself using a ton of other features. I do use the alarms to wake up and for reminders (like when my kids have to get on the school bus), and I’ll change the color of the watch face from time to time, just for variety.
The 265 can show some notifications from your phone, although you can’t reply back to texts unless you’re on Android. I don’t like to get notifications on my watch—I even have most notifications turned off on my phone—so this wasn’t an important feature for me.
To get the most out of the watch, you’ll want to install the Garmin Connect app. It gives you quick visuals and graphs of all your metrics, like your training readiness and status, how you slept last night, what workouts you have coming up, and more. This is also where you can view the results of your runs (maps, split times, etc) and where you can create workouts or sign yourself up for a training program. The analytics are good enough you may want to drop your Strava subscription—but plenty of runners use both.
Taking it for a run
When you want to run with the Forerunner 265, you hit the START button, and select the type of workout you’d like to start. That’s usually “Run” if you’re a runner, but Track Run, Treadmill Run, and Trail Run are all available as well. The watch can also track strength workouts, cycling, and more.
When you’re on the Run screen, the watch will often suggest a workout for you to do. You can do the workout, view future workouts and choose one of those instead, or dismiss it and do whatever you want—either a “just run” kind of workout, or a workout you have programmed yourself. For example, I have the trendy Norwegian 4x4 programmed as one of the workouts I can select.
Data fields
There is a ton of data you can have on your wrist when you run. You’ll want to choose your favorites ahead of time and create a screen that displays them. You can get anything from your current altitude to your predicted finish time, but most of us will choose some combination of time, distance, pace, and/or heart rate.
My favorite screen for everyday runs has the time of day (so I know if I’m running late, literally, to a deadline or a family responsibility), my total distance (because I’m usually trying to hit a target mileage for the day), my current pace (some runners prefer an average lap pace, but I like the instantaneous one), and a colored gauge at the bottom with my heart rate zones.
If I’m doing an interval workout, I often prefer a screen with more data fields, including the time and distance of the current lap and the previous lap. When you run a race, you might like to create a PacePro plan with custom splits for every mile that it coaches you through. You can even program a specific race course, for example to give you slower paces on hills.
Creating and following workouts
I found myself doing a lot of the daily suggested workouts. The watch will suggest these for you nearly every day (some days, it suggests a rest day) whether you’ve set up a training program or not. If you put a race, like a 5K, on your calendar in the app, it will keep that in mind when suggesting workouts. I wouldn’t trust major training decisions to anything automated, but it’s great for spicing up a workout routine. My weeks typically had two “base” runs at a steady pace, one or two tempo runs or medium-intensity intervals, and maybe a day with “anaerobic” work like short sprints. There might also be a two-mile, slow-paced “recovery” run in there somewhere.
Because daily suggested workouts (DSW, in Garmin parlance) are a feature of the watch, not the app, you used to have to push buttons on the watch to see what workouts you had coming up. But Garmin recently added a “Garmin Coach” option to the Connect app, which is basically a way to get your DSW on the app instead. If you want to set up a training plan in the app, you can either choose this automated Garmin Coach plan, or a plan for a standard race distance (like a marathon or 5K) that is designed by Coach Jeff, Coach Greg, or Coach Amy.
You can also create your own workouts: Go to the Garmin Connect app on your phone, and select More, then Training & Planning, and Workouts. Remember to hit the button that sends the workout to your watch; that doesn’t happen automatically, for some reason. Once I got the hang of it, it was easy to create workouts. As I mentioned, I used a custom workout, complete with heart rate targets for each section, to do the Norwegian 4x4. I also created custom workouts for weightlifting.
When you do a workout, the watch shows you a data screen specifically for whatever target you’re supposed to pay attention to, according to the way that workout is programmed. For example, if it wants me to run at a 10:20 pace for 39 minutes, the watch will tell me how many minutes I have left, and show my pace as being in the green zone if I’m close to 10:20, or in the red if I’m going too fast or too slow. It will give me an audio alert (via my headphones if they’re paired, or through my phone if not) telling me to speed up or slow down. My only gripe is that it’s not possible to turn these audio alerts off, since they are super disruptive if I’m trying to pay attention to a podcast or audiobook.
Using laps
The physical lap button is one of the best things about using a Garmin rather than a phone-centric smartwatch. I can hit the button as soon as I want the lap to start or end, rather than flicking my wrist to turn on the display, visually locating the button I want to press, and then hoping that it registers my finger on the first tap. (This may sound easy, but when I’m sweaty and shaking at the end of a fast 400, I’ve had to poke my Apple Watch far too many times before it registered, meaning my lap time would be several seconds off.)
You can also program a workout, or use a built-in workout. For example, to test my mile time, I can give myself a warmup and then tell it to start a 1-mile lap when I press the lap button. The watch keeps track of distance, and automatically ends the lap (and announces it is doing so) when I’ve covered exactly one mile.
After the run
When you finish a run or workout, the watch will ask you how hard a workout it was, and how strong you felt. (You can turn this off if you don’t want it.) The watch then displays several screens of statistics: not just your pace and distance, but also a gauge of how much aerobic and anaerobic work it thinks you got from it, what type of training benefit (was it a base run or a tempo run?), and an update of your VO2max if appropriate. VO2max is measured based on your heart rate relative to how fast you were going according to GPS, so it won’t change after treadmill runs or other indoor work. You may want to turn off VO2max estimations for trail runs, so that when you slow down on hills it won’t think you suddenly got less fit.
Treadmill runs
I loved the treadmill feature for steady runs, but found it infuriating if I had to follow any kind of interval program. At the end of a treadmill run you can “calibrate” by entering the exact distance displayed on the treadmill screen. So, for example, if the watch thinks you went 4.87 miles, but you actually ran 5.0, you can enter 5.0 and your paces and mileage will adjust. The watch also remembers this—basically, how the motion of your watch corresponded to your pace—and can use it to more accurately gauge your pace and distance next time.
But this is just a band-aid fix for what’s really an unsolvable problem. A watch, riding on your wrist, cannot know how fast your feet are going. It can get a sense of how much wrist-bouncing correlates to an 11-minute-per-mile pace, but that doesn’t mean that it will understand what’s going on when you run an eight-minute pace or when you slow to a walk (or, worse yet, rest your hand on the handrail). I found that interval workouts were basically impossible to follow. The watch would think I was going too slow, so I’d exaggeratedly pump my arms and it would sometimes, maybe, believe me that I was actually going the programmed pace.
I wish there were a way to turn off the “too slow”/ “too fast” alerts for the workouts the watch creates, but there isn’t. The best solution I found was to jot down the times and paces from the workout, and then create a new custom workout without any pace targets, and run that.
Accuracy
I tested both the 265 and 265s alongside a chest strap heart rate monitor, and found that both were fastidiously accurate, with just a slight lag on the 265 that I'm pretty sure is due to the fit—the best size of watch is the one that fits you best, and the smaller watch is clearly the better one for me. If you've seen my other reviews and comparisons, you'll notice that it's hard to find an optical device that can keep up this well with a chest strap, but these Forerunners are easily up to the task. (The Coros Pace watches are the only others I've tested that are this accurate, with the Apple Watch following closely behind.)
The location accuracy on these watches is also excellent. I regularly use my 265S as the gold standard to compare other devices to; it's so accurate I can tell from the map which side of the road I was running on. For a representative example, here's the 265S in black, along with a Fitbit in blue. I was running on a track, but I did not use Track Mode here. The line you see is what it got from GPS. Truly impressive.
Racing with the Forerunner 265
I'm an on-and-off runner, and when I first buckled into the Forerunner 265, I was only a few months into my latest "on" phase. Since I didn't have any serious competitive goals, I ignored some of its suggested workouts but did others, whenever the mood struck me. And over time, I noticed its prediction of my 5K time was trending further and further downward. The paces it programmed for my "base" runs were going down, as well. Was I becoming a faster runner? It sure seemed like it! And while I should probably take most of the credit myself, I can't help but acknowledge that the watch helped me by showing how much progress I'd been making. And the watch face complication that shows my weekly mileage was a constant reminder that I had the power to stay consistent in my training.
I do think I ran more miles, more consistently, and with more challenging workouts, than I likely would have done on my own. As my fitness improved, and the weather cooled down, I started to notice my predicted 5K time was dropping fast. It used to be over 30 minutes; then it was 29, 28, 27...
I know not to read too much into any kind of prediction. From what I've seen on forums, most people find Garmin's predictions a bit too optimistic. But I started to wonder how fast I could really run a 5K, so I ended up signing up for one. The day before the race, my watch told me I was capable of running 25:50. Could that be true?
I created a PacePro plan for 26 minutes, with negative splits, but on race morning I decided I was too skeptical of the prediction to put that much faith in it. Instead, I just hit the "run" button and used the same data screen as for my training runs, with no pacing guidance. Shockingly, I found myself holding a faster pace, for longer, than I ever had during my entire season of training thus far. I finished in 26:04, just 14 seconds off the prediction.
Ironically, I forgot to pause my watch right away, and the GPS shaved off a bit of a corner that I had not actually cut in real life. So my watch thinks I ran 3.09 miles in 26:14, and did not credit me with a 5K PR. But I got a medal for being first in my age group, so it's hard to be too mad.
I’ll say it again: This is a great watch for runners. The Forerunner 2xx line is probably the most popular line of running watches out there, with mega-popular running app Strava reporting that the top running device among its users in 2023 was the Forerunner 235 worldwide, and the 245 Music in the U.S. (Among older Forerunners, music storage used to be an extra feature; as of the 265, it’s standard on all models.) Not only does this statistic tell you it’s a popular line of watches, but the popularity of the older models is a testament to the Forerunner’s durability and continued utility over time.
I found that the 265 did everything I needed a running watch to do, plus it provided tons of interesting data unobtrusively. If you don’t care about your HRV, you can hide that glance. If you don’t want daily workout suggestions, you can turn those off. I find the way it presents its HRV scores to be the most useful and readable of any gadget out there (and I’ve tested a few!)
Ultimately I feel I can recommend this watch to any runner or athlete. You can save money by going with the Forerunner 55 or 165, and still get most of the key features (no HRV or training readiness). Or you can splurge on a fancier watch. But the 265 is the sweet spot of the line, this line is the sweet spot (for runners) among Garmins, and Garmin is the gold standard for athletic smartwatches. This is the watch that every other running watch has to face off against. Good luck to them; it will be a tough competition.
Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, has written two books, and is a certified personal trainer. She’s been writing about health, fitness, and science for over a decade, and can front squat 225 pounds.
