Garmin Forerunner 255 Wins Amsterdam Marathon

Lemi Berhanu won the 2026 Amsterdam Marathon wearing a Garmin Forerunner 255, a watch Garmin introduced in June 2022. Gadgets & Wearables says Berhanu’s representatives confirmed the model after he ran 2:03:33 on October 18, missing the course record by three seconds. In wet conditions, the Ethiopian pulled clear of Nicholas Kipkorir in the closing kilometres for the fastest marathon of his career.

That is a useful reality check for runners staring at every launch cycle. The Forerunner 255 is a 48-gram, five-button watch with a memory-in-pixel display, multi-band GPS, wrist-based optical heart-rate tracking, running power, HRV status and Garmin’s training metrics. Garmin quotes up to 30 hours of GPS-only battery life, or up to 16 hours with multi-band positioning. Those are practical marathon tools: readable pace, dependable satellite tracking and no anxiety about charging. The screen may lack AMOLED flash, but daylight legibility matters more when the effort is all-out.

What is missing is just as clear. The Forerunner 255 does not bring the AMOLED screen and extra training features of the Forerunner 265, nor the hardware and software updates Garmin put into the Forerunner 570 and 970. It also sits far from the premium direction of the [Fenix 9](/en/articles/garmin-fenix-9-adds-faster-maps-and-brighter-amoled-2026-10-20). Those upgrades can be attractive for daily wear, maps or broader smartwatch use. But Gadgets & Wearables makes the fair point that little of it would substantially change a marathon race.

Our verdict: the Forerunner 255 remains more than enough for runners who want pace, GPS and serious training data, rather than a newer display or luxury extras. Berhanu’s win does not make an old watch faster. It does show that a solid running watch has a much longer competitive life than the product cycle suggests.