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Coros makes great running watches that are seriously underrated. You'll recall that I ranked the Pace 4 as the best running watch under $250, and I think the Pace Pro (with its larger screen and offline maps) is excellent, too. And while Coros watches do the basics quite well, they also have a surprising number of useful yet often hidden features. Here are 10 of my best tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Coros running watch.
Use the Extender for detailed maps while you’re running
One of these gives more information than the other!
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
The Pace Pro watch has maps built in; the Pace 4 just has basic navigation without maps. You probably already knew that. But whichever you have on your wrist, you may not have realized you can pull out your phone during a run to see a detailed map (with satellite view!) right on your phone. Instead of fiddling with the controls on your tiny watch screen, you can zoom on your phone as it updates in real time with your location and the path you’ve run so far.
To use this feature, just open the Coros app on your phone while you’re running. Right at the top of the main screen, you’ll see a card with your current live activity. Tap that card and you’re in what Coros calls the Extender, a tool that lets you view data from the activity and even update some information directly to the watch.
There’s a lot you can do with the Extender—we’ll look at the Adventure Journal later—but mapping is hands-down its best feature. If your watch doesn’t have maps (like the Pace 4), you essentially get them here for free. And if your watch does have maps (like the Pace Pro), you can view a higher-resolution map, with easier-to-operate controls, from this screen instead of making do with what’s on your watch.
Get your stats every mile without creating a new lap
By default, Coros watches will mark a lap for you every mile if you’re not doing a specific workout. This is nice because the watch will show your time and pace for that mile. It’s a pretty standard feature.
But this also means that when you look at the activity later, you’ll see each mile as its own lap. If you want to track a different set of laps—the first versus the second loop around your neighborhood, perhaps—the auto laps will interfere.
Fortunately, a recent update changes that. You can now program automatic laps separately from distance alerts. Here’s how to get the best of both worlds:
On the watch, go to the Run mode (or Trail Run, etc.), go to Auto Lap, and change it to OFF.
Also under the Run (etc.) mode, go to Activity Alert, then Distance Alert, and make sure it is set to ON. You can set a distance here, which you probably want as 1.00 mile.
If you want to hear your time and pace out loud when the alert arrives, go back to that run mode and change Voice Alert to ON.
This way, I’m able to do two loops of a two-mile trail, and end up with two laps, one for each loop, while also getting a reminder every mile of my pace.
Load a route (even if you know where you’re going) to get Hill Alerts
This is another new-ish feature, and it’s a great one if you run a lot of hilly trails. Coros has Hill Alerts that will tell you when you’re starting a major uphill section, and it will let you know how many more hills you have waiting for you. You can preview the hills on the whole route, or just wait for the alerts to surprise you as you’re running. I find these useful, since I’ll know how long of a hill I have coming up and can pace myself accordingly.
To use this feature, though, the watch has to know where you’re going. Create a route from the Explore tab, or download one you created in another app like Strava. Then tap Sync with your watch. I have a library of routes saved for my favorite trails, so using this feature is as simple as choosing a route from the same screen where I start my run. (Instead of hitting Start, just scroll down to Navigation and select the route you’re running.)
Fix your voice training notes in two ways
After you finish an activity on the Pace 4, you can record a little voice note with anything you’d like to remember about the activity. I’ve written before about how I find this incredibly useful. For strength training, I read in the highlights of my workout log. For runs and other activities, I’ll say something about how the run felt or what factors may have affected me (like the heat, lately).
But sometimes you miss something you wanted to include, or you otherwise screw up the recording. If you don’t notice this until later, you have two options that each show up a little differently.
One is to fix it from the watch. From the watch face, scroll or swipe up to see your widgets. One of the widgets shows your previous activities. Select the activity, scroll down to the voice note, and re-record it. This overwrites the old recording, and if you wait a few minutes, the transcription in the app will be redone as well.
Or you can edit it as text from your phone. The original voice note gets transcribed into text, but if you hit the garbage can icon next to the note on your phone, the voice recording disappears and you now just have a text box where you can edit the text (or add to it) as much as you’d like.
This is a tiny hidden feature that I only just learned about, and I love it. Whenever you mark a lap (or the auto-lap feature marks a lap for you), a screen with that lap’s statistics stays on your watch for what seems like forever—eight seconds, I believe. But if you’d like to get back to your regular screen, there’s a simple way: Just turn the dial a click or two. The lap is still marked, but the screen goes away.
Set up a running routine with the Coros Training Hub
You probably knew you could download a training schedule to the Coros app and thus to your watch. (If you didn’t: Go to the Training Plan Library under settings and see all your options.) But there’s another way to get runs showing up as scheduled: Add them yourself on your calendar on the Coros Training Hub.
The Coros Training Hub is a website that provides a much easier interface for planning than the phone app does. To use it, go here (the link will only work if you’re logged in to your Coros account). Click the calendar icon on the middle right side of the screen, and then select or create a training plan.
Here’s how I used it to create a basic schedule for myself in minutes. Click a day, then hit “Quick Workout” and fill in the essentials. For example: Run, 3 miles, no pace target. Once you’ve created that workout, you can copy and paste it to other days. Right now I’m doing short easy runs on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and a longer run on Sundays. I got a month’s worth of that schedule set up quickly (changing some of the details each week, like making the long run longer) and then I saved the training plan. Once it’s created, I could then drag it to any future date on the calendar, and now I have my runs set out for me.
This means that if I scroll to the widgets on my watch, I can see what run I’ve scheduled for myself for today (or tomorrow, or later this week). And when I start a run, it asks me if I’d like to do that three-miler I had planned.
Find the hidden screens on the Pace 4
This is a simple hack that evaded me for the longest time. If you ever find yourself on a strange screen while you’re running, and don’t know how to get back to the screen you were on, that’s because Coros changed the screen layout. (If I’m remembering right, they changed it twice. Just when I figured out the old way, it stopped working.)
On the Pace 4, the action button on the lower left side of the watch switches between navigation, music controls, and your regular activity data screens. When you’re on a data screen, scrolling or swiping up and down cycles through the different data screens.
You can think of it as three different columns; scroll up and down within the column of data screens to see all of those variations, or use the action button to move sideways to the next column.
Save photos to specific map areas with the Adventure Journal
If you see something interesting on your run—or if you want to make a note about how you’re feeling—the Adventure Journal makes it a lot easier to review later. This also uses the Extender feature, so pull out your phone during the run and tap the live activity card.
From here, you can take a photo, or you can mark a spot as a “pin.” Pins can also have photos and text attached. I don’t normally allow my phone camera to store location information in photos, so when I’m on the trail, this gives me an easy way to make note of where something is. Here’s the weird gravestone in the woods; here’s that trail fork I want to investigate later; and so on.
Track your rest times at waypoints
Here’s a feature I just learned about that seems like it will come in handy for longer runs where I’m taking breaks. The Trail Run feature now has the ability to track a lap for how long you rest at a waypoint.
Waypoints are points on the map that are embedded in the route you’re navigating. They’re not the same as pins, even though they seem like they should be the same thing. (You can convert a pin into a waypoint, though.)
If you plan to run a long trail and rest at certain points along the way—like the aid stations that ultramarathon runners stop at during races—the Lap Details section of your activity will show the time you spent at each waypoint before moving on. With this recent heat wave, I’ve been using my car as a cool-down spot in the middle of longer runs, so I’m looking forward to using waypoints to keep track of this.
Geek out on your training metrics on the phone or web
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Coros
When you scroll or swipe up from the watch face, you can find analytics like your training status and training load. But the view you get on the watch is just a tiny taste of what Coros can tell you about how hard you’ve been training (and how much you should be training).
If you tap on Training Status in the Coros phone app, you’ll see some graphs with not just your status (I’m optimized, great) but also showing how your fitness has changed over time and whether you’re staying in the recommended window for intensity.
What’s more, you can log on to the Training Hub and get even more detailed information. With graphs like the one above, you can view how your fitness has changed next to your workout intensity, VO2max, or any of a number of other metrics. You can see how you’re doing now compared to a few months ago, and how your training has affected things like your lactate threshold. I can see that I’ve been slacking off since getting back from Hyrox, but I’ve also finally started training a little harder and will probably see the benefit of that soon.
