What I Wish I Knew Before Training With the Garmin Forerunner 265

Garmin’s Forerunner 265 was the first modern running watch I spent a lot of time with—you can read my review here about how it drew me back into tracking all my run data, for better or for worse. But there are some things that, in hindsight, I wish I had understood better at the start of the journey. Here are the biggest ones that you might like to know about.

Why it has so many dang buttons

The 265 (and other recent Forerunners) seem to have too many buttons. What do we need five of them for, when we’re doing most things from the touchscreen anyway? Garmin’s Vivoactive line gets away with having just two, as do the Coros Pace 3 and Pace Pro, which have all the same main functions as the 265. 

But as soon as I saw the previous generation—the Forerunner 255—I understood. The 265 stands on the shoulders of giants, as the Forerunner 2xx series has long been beloved by runners—before the 265 was the 255, and before that the 245, and before that the 235. (Remember when Strava reported that the 235, then an eight-year-old watch, was the most popular running watch worldwide?) 

The 255 and its ancestors did not have a touchscreen, nor did they have AMOLED displays. They used a “light” button in the top left to turn on the backlight so you could read the screen in the dark, and two buttons below that (“up” and “down”) to scroll through menu options. And once you have five buttons, why not use them for more? Long pressing the light button now brings up a shortcut menu, long pressing the “up” button brings up settings, and long pressing the bottom button can bring up your music controls. 

Once you know what the buttons are used for—or assign your own shortcuts, which you can do in settings—they’re pretty handy.

Why it thinks I need so much “recovery” time

After each workout, the 265 (and many other Garmins) will tell you how many hours of recovery it thinks you need. That makes it sound like you should rest until time is up—so if I have a 24-hour recovery time, I should wait until tomorrow for my next workout. Makes sense, since I was probably going to do that anyway. 

But sometimes, after a hard effort, the watch will give me a recovery time of, say, 78 hours. I’m really not supposed to run again for that long? Not even an easy run? 

That’s not what it means, of course. As Garmin explains, recovery time is the amount of time until you will maximally benefit from another similarly hard workout. So if I just did an hour’s worth of brutal track intervals, I won’t get much benefit from doing the same workout tomorrow. I could go ahead and do an easy run tomorrow, and schedule another track session a few days from now. 

In other words, the “recovery” time is just how long you should wait before doing another very hard workout, not until you can work out at all.

The daily suggested workouts should only be taken as suggestions

Daily suggested workouts are a great feature of the Forerunner 265 and several other Garmin watches. DSW, as I call them, live on the watch and can’t be accessed directly from the Garmin Connect app—at least in theory. 

There is a “Garmin coach” feature that you can set up in the app, which works the same way as the DSW, giving you a workout each day based on what it thinks you need. The factors that go into this include how recovered you are, and what races you have on your calendar. 

I love the DSW when I’m not sure what run to do on a given day, or if I know I want a certain type of workout but don’t want to have to design it myself. But I don’t follow them slavishly, for two reasons. 

One is that you can’t plan for DSW. You might see that tomorrow is a seven-mile long run, but then you wake up to find it’s been switched to a two-mile recovery run because you didn’t sleep so well. On these days, just go run the seven-miler anyway, and don’t worry about what Garmin says. Or preview the upcoming workouts (under Training > Workouts > Daily Suggestions) and pick a future workout that speaks to you. 

The other problem is that, without long-term planning, you don’t know if the DSW will actually get you ready for the race you’re training for. Garmin forums and subreddits are full of people who are getting unsettlingly close to their marathon date and haven’t yet had any seriously long runs. You need mileage to be ready for a long-distance race, both in terms of your long runs and your total weekly workload. 

If you want to use Garmin workouts to train you for a long race, do yourself a favor and grab a tried-and-true marathon plan, like one of these from Hal Higdon. Make sure you get in a similar amount of mileage each week, whether your Garmin tells you to or not.

You can download some pretty sweet watch faces

I’m not sure why I spent so long using the stock watch faces, even though I found them kind of boring. The 265 doesn’t have as many color options for them as later watches like the 570, so there are only a handful of designs and a handful of (mostly neon) color options to choose from. 

But if you’re willing to venture into the Connect IQ store, you have more options. It feels a bit sketchy if you’re purchasing a watch face—payment isn’t handled through the platform directly—but there are some real gems in there, including some that are made by Garmin and some that are free or have a free version. Around Christmas time I went for this cheesy wreath, and my everyday favorite is Big Easy with the blue theme. It’s the one you can see in the photo above, and unlike most third-party faces, it can show all my favorite complications, including weekly running mileage, which I have at the bottom.