• Quartz movement
• Glass crystal
• Case diameter: 48.7 mm
• Stainless-steel case; Yellow dial; Date function
• Water-resistant to 330 feet (100 M)

The Men’s Freestyle FS40335 Bishop Watch has a clean sophisticated style that can be worn in virtually any day-to-day situation you can imagine. The Freestyle Bishop watch also makes a great choice as a durable, high performing sports watch that features a stainless steel case that is topped by a round, stainless steel, raised bevel that features machine cut accents. Surrounding case frames a striking yellow dial face that has silver hour and minute hands and hour and minute markers that are coated in luminous paint that allows you to read the time in dark conditions. The watch features a date window that is positioned at the three o’clock position on the dial. The watch is attached to a black polyurethane strap that works itself smoothly around the round edges of the Freestyle watch case. With a glass crystal dial window the watch is water-resistant to 100 meters making it a capable watch for water activities such as swimming, surfing, sailing and recreational dives. The Freestyle watch company has worked hard to create an extensive collection of watches that are noted for both their innovation and performance. Freestyle watches are popular timepieces for action-oriented individuals who enjoy biking, surfing, skiing, hiking and any other outdoors sports.

Freestyle Men’s FS40335 Bishop Polyurethane Watch

The Luminox 8151 timepiece features a 45mm case made from stainless steel, a brushed stainless steel bezel that features etchings at 10-minute numerical indexes. The watch is secured to the wearers wristwith a highly durable polyurethane band that has a buckle clasp safety mechanism. With Arabic numerals adorning a particularly eye-catching dial. The watch has smaller numerals marking the 24 hour clock and date calandar positioned at the six o’clock position of the watch.

The Luminox 8151 EVO watch has three sub-dials that allow the watch to keep precise timekeeping. This watch is powered by and analog Quartz movement and features a dial that is protected by a dial window that is made from anti-reflective material. The Lumionx watches are the timepieces that were chosen for the US Air Force Pilots and US Navy SEALs. The watch is water resistant to depths of up to 200 meters or 660 feet making for a diving watch that is up to more than simply recreational scuba diving expeditions.

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Luminox Men’s 8151 EVO Ultimate SEAL Chronograph Watch

The watch is a durable, able sport watch. The watch dial window is made from a durable scratch-resistant crystal which envelops the jet-black dial. Featuring feminine pink hands and quaint Arabic numerals to mark the hours. The face features indexes as well as a date display at the 3 o’clock position. With Swiss-quartz movement and an amazing 50-month battery life that powers the watch light and movement, this Colormark watch is built to endure deep dives and is rated to 200m (660 feet) below the surface of the ocean. A cute, quaint, and functional divers watch for women.

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Luminox A.7065 Colormark Women’s Watch

With hundreds of great looking sports watches on the market, it’s no surprise that runners often feel quite overwhelmed when buying a watch for their training.

The high level of complexity in many of the features supported in the latest watches only adds to the confusion.

Having options is nice, but makes choosing one tricky.

As runners, it also helps to realize that we have our own particular set of needs and requirements, while a standard digital watch with stopwatch timer is fine for a recreational fun runner or occasional jogger, it won’t cut it for those striving for peak performance.

In this article we outline the features needed by serious runners who are looking to improve their physiological condition for better competitive performance.

We define the criteria for a runner that can be regarded as serious as one who:

• Races regularly, be it on an Olympic standard 400m running track, fun runs and road races on tarmac or cross country through mud and trails
• Most likely does frequent Interval Training
• Does several longer, slower runs every week
• Records their activity in a Training Diary

Unless you are training seriously, a complicated running watch is probably not necessary. If the extent of your physical activity is a couple of long run a week, then a cheap sports watch under $20 with basic stopwatch timer like the Casio Men’s Digital Sport Watch W756B-1AV should be just fine.

But runners who do take their training seriously can benefit from a more advanced watch. If you fall into this category then read on…

Like a recreational jogger, the serious runner’s most basic requirement is to track time over a run, but a serious runner also requires the ability to record and recall segments of a run or lap splits, both for their long runs and distance based interval training.

A countdown timer or interval timer can also be useful for athletes wishing to run time based interval training.

So the three basic features of a running watch are:

• A Stopwatch Chronograph
• Lap Storage and Recall for distance based interval training and long runs; and
• A Countdown Timer or Interval Timer feature for time based interval training

The Stopwatch Chronograph

The Stopwatch Mode or Chronograph of a running watch simply keep a running time in hours, minutes, seconds and fractions of seconds.

Cheap watch models usually only have start/stop and lap buttons that start, stop and pause the display without stopping the stopwatch. Few cheap watches have the memory capacity to store sessions or laps, so all times will be lost when the chronograph is rest.

Most good running watches can display two or more data fields on the screen. In the Chronograph mode, one half of the screen typically displays your overall time or split, the other your current lap time.

The more advanced the sports watches, the greater the ability you have to customize the real-time display and the larger the variety of data fields that can be presented.

When choosing a running watch, it pays to pick one with a digital display that is comfortable to read at arm’s length while on a run.

You will have to live with your watch for a long time, so it pays to compare a few until you are happy with the display.

The diagram shows the relationship between laps and splits

Lap Recall and Storage

Running watches with Lap Storage can save split (a snapshot of overall time)/lap (the segment of time since the last split) times in the watch’s memory. Some digital sports watches maintain a session history, while others can save laps in memory, but only store one session at a time.

Runners who wish to save their repetition times should seek a session history sports watch. Session history watches allow you to to cycle through a list of sessions ordered by date and time. Each session contains information about your workout such as overall time, lap times (if a multi-lap session), your best and average lap times and even heart rate and speed information over a lap, should your watch have the ability to measure heart rate and pace.

The number of sessions a watch can store typically ranges from 10 to 150 laps, but can be a lot more in the top line watches. While 150 laps of memory might seem like quite a lot, you’d be surprised how much you can fill over a week. The table below shows an example week.

The amount of session storage you need depends on what you are comfortable with. The more storage capacity on the watch, the longer you can wait before updating your diary. If the storage capacity is small, you will have to update every few workouts.

The Timex Ironman 30-Lap Watch is a probably the minimum you should look for – it’s enough for most people’s speed sessions and a few long runs.

Click here to view 30, 50, 100, 150 and 200 session watches.

Countdown and Interval Timers

A Countdown Timer lets you set a time and when started – counts down to zero. The classic Countdown Timer lets you specify if you want the timer to beep and repeat the countdown at the end of the first cycle, beep and stop or beep and count upwards.

The drawback is that it runs over a fixed time interval. In practice, most timed interval workouts require varying length time intervals.

For example 3 minutes of running, followed by 2 minutes of recovery, repeated 8 times.

Unless you plan on doing a continuous session of equal-length efforts and recoveries, you’d have to do a lot of button-pushing to make this feature work.

Fortunately some watches have an interval timer like Timex Ironman Watch’s Interval Timer mode. It allows you to program different-length segments into the same cycle. A Countdown Timer or Interval Timer feature is not essential, unless you are doing fixed time repetitions, but it can be an extremely useful feature.

View a comprehensive collection of Timex Ironman Interval Timer Watches here.

Some other things to look for are:

• A scratch-resistant watch face
• Buttons that are easy to press while running
• A comfortable band that is a good fit on the wrist

Some more advanced features you might also consider are:

• Heart Rate Monitor
• Heart Rate Zones and Alerts
• Long Battery Life
• Solar Power Battery Charger
• Training Measurement and Goal Tracking
• GPS Tracking
• Pedometer Tracking
• Altitude Measurement
• Pace/Distance Measurement
• Pace/Distance Zones and Alerts
• Customizable Display
• Calorie Measurement
• Cadence Foot Pod Option
• Computer Data Uplink and Software

Hopefully choosing a sports watch will now be much easier. Of course, what is mentioned here only scratches the surface of what modern sports watches have to offer. You will still need to shop around, but at least now you can quickly discard the watches that won’t be much use as a running watch.