There’s something refreshingly purposeful about the Suunto Race 2.
At a time when smartwatches increasingly try to become miniature smartphones strapped to the wrist, Suunto has taken a rather different route.
Its latest performance watch is unapologetically designed around athletes, adventurers and people who take their sports and training seriously.
The Race 2 is not just about counting steps or telling you that you have been sitting down too long. This is a watch designed for the starting line, the mountain trail, the open road and the long training session when battery life, navigation and easily readable information matter more than another smartphone notification.
The Suunto Race 2 is a performance watch for racing and training, and its spec sheet backs that up. It’s got numerous sport modes, offline maps, dual-band GPS, advanced training tools and battery life that can stretch to an impressive 200 hours (depending on the GPS mode being used).
Bigger, brighter and easier to read
Easily the most noticeable feature of the Race 2 is its display. Suunto equips the watch with an expansive 1.5-inch (38.1mm) LTPO AMOLED screen with a resolution of 466 x 466 pixels. More importantly for anyone who spends considerable time outdoors, the display can reach a peak brightness of 2,000 nits. That matters when you are running under the midday sun, cycling at speed or trying to read a map while moving along a trail.
The generous screen also gives maps and multiple training data fields more breathing room. It’s protected by a sapphire crystal, something you’d see more on pricey dive watches (the Suunto Race 2 is also water-resistant to 100 meters).
Despite the larger display, Suunto has worked on making the Race 2 slimmer and lighter. The case measures 49 x 49 x 12.5 mm. The Stainless Steel version weighs 76 grams, while the Titanium drops that to 65 grams. For comparison, the original Race was 13.3 mm thick and weighed 83 grams in stainless steel or 69 grams in titanium, making the Race 2 both slimmer and lighter while gaining a larger display.
Made for serious training
The Race 2 truly stands out once you stop treating it simply as a watch and start using it as a training instrument. There are more than 115 sport modes covering activities ranging from trail running and mountain biking to ski touring and open-water swimming. Suunto also incorporates racing, pacing and nutrition tools as well as its ZoneSense technology for real-time intensity tracking.
Suunto has also redesigned the rear of the watch to improve wrist-based heart-rate measurement. The Race 2 additionally supports blood-oxygen measurement and provides the sort of everyday activity and recovery information expected of a high-performance sports watch.
For competitive runners, Race 2 adds measurements including ground contact time and vertical oscillation. These go beyond simply recording how fast or how far you have run and help provide elite-level info about running mechanics.
Finding your way without a signal
The great outdoors often have no data signal; and that’s where the Race 2’s navigation capabilities become particularly useful. The watch offers free detailed offline maps backed by highly accurate dual-band GPS. Routes can be planned through the Suunto app and transferred to the watch, allowing navigation even when there’s no phone signal.
There is 32GB of storage for outdoor offline maps, while Suunto’s Climb Guidance can provide information about the terrain ahead. Heatmaps can also help users identify popular routes — or avoid them when you want to take the road less traveled.
Battery life with real endurance
I found battery life to be one of the Race 2’s strongest attributes. In its highest-accuracy All-Systems GNSS multi-band configuration, the watch offers up to 55 hours of battery life. Switching to single-band GNSS extends that to as much as 65 hours, while its various battery modes provide figures of 55, 65, 90 and as much as 200 hours.
Used as an everyday smartwatch rather than continuously recording workouts, the Race 2 delivers up to 18 days with daily heart-rate monitoring and wrist-raise display activation.
Turn daily heart rate off and standby time can extend to as much as 30 days.
Those numbers change the relationship one has with a sports watch. Charging becomes something that can be planned rather than a daily ritual. The Race 2 also receives a redesigned secure-snap charging interface that employs a magnetic USB-C charging cable.
More than hardware, the physical watch is only one part of Suunto’s ecosystem. Race 2 works with the Suunto app and SuuntoPlus, while Suunto says its ecosystem extends to more than 300 partner apps. Among the services specifically cited by Suunto are Strava and TrainingPeaks.
A proper instrument on the wrist
The Suunto Race 2 ultimately feels like a product built around a straightforward philosophy: give serious users the information they need, make that info easy to see, make navigation dependable and make the battery last long enough that the watch does not become another thing to worry about.
The Race 2’s robust build reinforces that sense of purpose, while its light weight and slim, minimalist design make it capable of being used as an everyday watch without looking out of place.
Suunto distributor Dan’s Bike Shop currently lists the Stainless Steel Race 2 at Php31,290 (Php36,990 for the Titanium). I’m not an elite athlete, but as a serious tennis player who competed nationally in age groups as well as club tournaments in my youth, I appreciate the Suunto Race 2 for what it is: a seriously capable instrument for training and sports that also happens to look very good on the wrist.
Dan’s is at SM City North EDSA, SM Megamall, SM Aura, Parqal, and Alabang Town Center.
