My running journey started with a Garmin Forerunner. It wasn’t my watch — it was my high school cross country coach’s — but it brought a load of new metrics to a sport I was learning to love. I was amazed that something so small could monitor our team’s distance, pace, and lap times. Alright, maybe it could only monitor those of us running with our coach at any given time, but it’s still much better than a simple stopwatch.Little did I know that it was the most basic watch Garmin made. Yes, I learned to run with a Garmin Forerunner 10 beeping at me, never dreaming that I’d one day be using its successor to train for a marathon. Yet here I am with a Garmin Forerunner 970 on my wrist, essentially a smartwatch for runners, tracking metrics I never imagined. Here’s what makes it the best road running watch I’ve ever worn — but also why I think Garmin has gone too far in its quest to track literally everything.