The 2024 Amazon Prime Day sale is in full swing and if you've had your eye on a new GPS running watch for some time, there are plenty of amazing Garmin deals waiting to be snapped up. As a shopping editor, these are some of the lowest prices I've seen all year. I've been scouring the sale for several hours and the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar in particular is one of the best offers right now – down to just £199.99 at Amazon, saving you 31%.
The Instinct 2 is part of Garmin's range of rugged smartwatches. An entire series of watches sit under the Instinct umbrella, including the standard 2 (non-solar), 2 Solar, 2S and the 2S Solar. And if you ask us, it's not only one of the best Garmin watches on the market, but one of the best GPS running watches overall.
For a start, this model never runs out of battery life (as long as you spend at least three hours outside each day). It’s built to US military standard – aka it’s exceptionally rugged and won't break, no matter what you do with it or where you take it. And it gives you a mind-boggling amount of data on your running and your health.
What everyone's reading
The Instinct 2 offers Garmin’s full suite of health and wellness features – Body Battery, Sleep Score, Advanced Sleep Monitoring, Menstrual Cycle Tracking and Stress Tracking. We found the Body Battery feature – which measures your overall energy levels each day and gives this as a score out of 100 – to be particularly useful. It helped us better schedule our training sessions around other commitments, by giving us a clear indication of the sessions that left us feeling drained and in need of rest and recovery and those which didn't drain us quite so much.
Advanced fitness features also include VO2 Max Estimate, Fitness Age, Training Status/Load/Effect, Recovery Time and Daily Suggested Workout. Again, this was all data which our tester, who was training for a 70.3 triathlon, found to be genuinely beneficial in showing progress in her fitness and training load, as well as the amount of recovery time needed between sessions.
If you're after more advanced training tools, however, the Fenix 7 might be worth a look. The multi-sports watch is also 30% off for Amazon Prime Day, now £349.99. It's also got much more advanced navigational tools than the Instinct 2's basic mapping. But then again, for literally half the price of the Fenix, you get what you get what you pay for, and in the case of the Instinct 2, that’s rather a lot.
