Review: Garmin Forerunner 165

Even the most advanced fitness trackers can’t catch everything. While testing the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, I got a severe case of food poisoning and spent two days in bed. There’s nothing more irritating than your cheery fitness tracker notifying you that you’ve gotten tons of sleep and your Body Battery is at 100 as you’re struggling not to throw up water. It’s almost as irritating as your children shouting to ask if you’re still trapped in the bathroom.

When I finally got back to working out, the watch counseled me to build up my base with long, slow runs. This pace is insanely slow, particularly since I live next to a college campus full of long-legged teenagers, humiliating me with their vigorous strides, youthfulness, and hope. Nevertheless, I persist. My legs feel great. The Forerunner has allowed me to graduate to tempo runs, and my heart rate is lower than ever. Amazing!

The Forerunner 165 is the latest entry in Garmin’s Forerunner series, but there are no duds in the Forerunner lineup. If you’re a beginner runner who can find the barebones Forerunner 55 for under $200, that one is perfectly fine! However, the Forerunner 165 has enough additional features that, to me, it justifies the extra cash.

A Few More Features

The Forerunner 165 looks like your standard technical Garmin. It has the familiar five-button layout—three on the left and two on the right—with a chemically reinforced screen, a polymer bezel, and a silicone strap. Note: You will need to wash the strap every two to three days if you don’t want to get a wrist rash. It now also has a new, bright AMOLED display that I had no problem seeing in bright, direct sunlight.

It’s also a touchscreen, so instances where I spectacularly fail at navigating the button system have decreased dramatically. Same with times where I accidentally call my emergency contacts from holding the wrong button down for too long. (It’s the Up button on the left side. Don’t hold that button unless you’re in trouble.)

The higher-end Forerunner models are aimed at multisport athletes, but the Forerunner 165 is pretty explicitly aimed at runners. In addition to personalized, adaptive training plans, you can also now see metrics like running power and cadence on the screen on your wrist, as well as some of Garmin’s more esoteric proprietary metrics, like Training Effect, which helps you determine how impactful each workout was on your overall performance.

The reason you get a Forerunner 165 over a Forerunner 55 is that in addition to a nicer display, you also get more sensors. In addition to the now-standard multiband GPS positioning systems—GPS, Glonass, and Galileo, which lets you position yourself precisely for accurate workout metrics—the Forerunner 165 has the pulse oximetry blood oxygen sensor, as well as a barometric altimeter, compass, and ambient light sensor.

I find these things useful! We have historically been a little skeptical on the utility of the blood oxygen sensor, but I have a few friends who have gotten tipped off that they have sleep apnea with it, and I find the metric reassuring. An altimeter helps the watch gauge your distances run a little more accurately—running up a hill means you’re running farther and harder than if you’re running on flat ground—and the ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the light on the display and helps you conserve battery.

Features like this just make the overall experience a little nicer than with the cheaper watch, although it’s worth mentioning that last year’s Forerunner 255 has started to go on sale and also has these features, in addition to a higher-end Corning Gorilla Glass screen.

Data Heaven

If you want a Garmin for staying fit and running, then it’s everything you’ve ever hoped for. Nerds like myself could spend days poring over the data collected by a Forerunner and watching their metrics improve day by day. I have now been running for 30 out of the 40 years that I've been on Planet Earth, and I’ve tried so many proprietary running plans. Garmin’s are simple, flexible, and easy. Every day, you can either do the recommended run or not; at the recommended HR level, or not. Either way, your fitness improves measurably.

Food poisoning aside, I like Garmin’s Morning Report, which lets you quickly scroll through the day’s weather, your sleep measurements, and your daily Body Battery measurement. I cross-checked the sleep monitoring against a smart ring and found only minor deviations. Usually the Garmin marked me as getting between 10 to 20 minutes less sleep, but this did not seem significant to me; I usually spend a few minutes of indeterminate time rolling around trying to remember my dreams before I get up.

The battery life is advertised as 11 days, but I got around a week with multiple tracked activities per day. I didn’t mind, though, since I could plug it in at my desk with Garmin’s proprietary charger and get it up to 100 percent within an hour or so. The multiband satellite systems picked up even my craziest routes, like when I took a truly ridiculous zig-zagging route home when I realized I wasn’t going to make it home in time for an appointment.

Connect, Garmin’s proprietary app, underwent a redesign earlier this year, purportedly to make it easier to see and organize. Mine shows today’s activities at the top, with the middle showing my sleep and body battery measurements and the bottom showing my heart rate, intensity minutes, and stress. All of these are purely arbitrary, so you can rearrange them as you see fit and toggle through your challenges, calendar, and Garmin Coach along the bottom. I have no strong feelings about this redesign and do not find it strikingly easier to navigate than the old version.

One Big Snarl

I have one big quibble, which is that every year it seems to get harder to listen to music with a Garmin. That’s one of the primary reasons why someone might want a dedicated fitness tracker—to listen to music on a workout without taking your phone.

Every day, I stare in envy at my husband, who slips on his AirPods, connects them seamlessly to his Apple Watch Ultra, and waltzes out the door listening to streaming music via a cellular connection. Years ago, I remember that listening to music on a Garmin was easy and intuitive. By comparison, it's now much less so since other fitness trackers have become more tied into their respective ecosystems.

The Forerunner comes in a regular or in a Music version, which costs $50 more. I tested the Music version. When I tell you the amount of troubleshooting that I had to go through to play music via Spotify, you simply will not believe it. Just look at all the questions that people have. Once my playlist failed to upload to my watch, I checked off about 10 separate items—am I a Spotify Premium subscriber? Did a test activity transfer? Should I reboot? Should I just plug it in and use Express? I finally gave in and asked Garmin for help.

If you're having similar problems, one fix is to go through the Connect app and forget and re-add your network. I am salty enough about this to point out that in every other way, my watch gave every indication of being connected to Wi-Fi and that this was not a step that was listed in Garmin's troubleshooting guide. I was able to finally download and listen to my “badass” playlist, but the whole process seemed wildly outdated. Imagine Apple charging $50 extra for the special Apple Watch Music version that required 30 minutes of troubleshooting to fix.

With all that said, the Forerunner 165 is still another solid entry in Garmin’s Forerunner lineup and a worthy step up from the bare minimum Forerunner 55. It offers a few more significant features, including an altimeter and blood oxygen sensor, that I think are well worth the money. Just don't rely on it to tell you if you have stomach issues, or to provide a soundtrack, and you'll be fine.