GARMIN ENDURO

From £699, garmin.com

Garmin’s latest tracker is a big, rugged multisport watch rather than a dedicated cycling tool, but the Enduro packs plenty of tools and tracking smarts for two-wheel pursuits. For a start, there are four cycling modes – including Indoor, Outdoor, Mountain Biking and Triathlon – plus daily suggested workouts based on your recent training and recovery.

But the big headline here is battery life. On paper, the Enduro packs an unrivalled 80-hour GPS battery life, extendable up to 300 hours in Endurance mode – all boosted by juice-saving solar charging skills that use the sun’s rays to top up the Enduro’s endurance. In reality, the watch lasted a staggering 30 days, with 30 hours of indoor and out GPS-tracked workouts on a single charge. An eight-hour outdoor effort with full GPS burns just ten per cent.

Beyond that game-changing battery, you also get Garmin’s full suite of training and recovery insights, with post-ride training effect, training load monitoring and training status to help you build fitness and avoid overtraining.

It also plays nice with turbos, power meters, speed and cadence sensors, and pulls data from your stationary bikes like the Wattbike Atom. All that means you can boost the range of real-time and post-ride fitness data on the watch, including your Functional Threshold Power – provided you’ve got the right accessories. The mid-workout screens are customisable on the watch itself, so you can tweak which metrics take priority, and the colour display is bright, sharp and easy to read in all lights.

On the flipside, you don’t get the maps – just turn-by-turn navigation – and music support is limited. But these are small sacrifices for a watch you might only need to charge 12 times a year.