Suunto has launched a Courtney Dauwalter-branded version of its latest sport watch, the Suunto Race S Titanium. This compact and lightweight version of the company’s AMOLED lineup is largely geared toward trail runners who have smaller wrists or simply want a lighter watch to help drive their activities. Dauwalter’s contribution includes a strap that (with the right prompting) proclaims her mantra, “Believe,” in her own handwritten style.

“It’s like a party on your wrist — it’s so colorful and bright,” Dauwalter said of the new watch, formally known as the Suunto Race S Titanium Courtney Edition.

Dauwalter is widely recognized as one of greatest trail and mountain athletes ever. She has won every major race imaginable — such as Western States, UTMB, Hardrock, Javelina Jundred, Run Rabbit Run and Moab — often setting records in the process. “Believe” is part of the mental motivation that the longtime Suunto athlete leans into during her most difficult moments, when the “pain cave” begins to close in around her.

The new strap glows in the dark, which is when her mantra appears on it, shining in even the blackest hours. Meanwhile, the daytime colors of the Dauwalter-branded strap taps into the fun and quirkiness of the runner herself, who is well known for her effervescent personality, infectious laugh … and not taking herself too seriously.

During a media call ahead of the launch of the new branding, Dauwalter called the process of brainstorming and creating this watch with the Suunto team “so much fun.”

The goal was “to create this really lightweight, really compact watch that had a huge battery life and had the ability to customize its face so that you could get as much detail or as little detail as you want — the ability to see it and use it really intuitively and easily while you’re in motion,” Dauwalter said. “A really easy to read screen was probably my hardest request for them. …

“But then to have this glow-in-the-dark secret message that reveals itself only at certain times, but you know is there all the time, feels like the most special part of it for me,” she added. “This secret cheerleader that we all now get to have on our wrist.”

The Suunto Race S steel and titanium versions have received broadly positive reviews from tech experts like DC Rainmaker and DesFit since their launches earlier this year (ActionHub also spent several weeks enjoying this device). The watch is comfortable to wear, has amazing accuracy and includes a bevvy of modern features (like offline mapping, Climb Guidance, naps and an improved heart-rate monitor) that previous generations of Suuntos often hadn’t seen. The high-definition AMOLED touchscreen display is super sharp even in fast situations, and the algorithms offer personalized feedback on training load, progress and recovery, calculated based on heart rate variability.

The Race S comes in with around 30 hours of GPS tracking on dual-frequency mode and, frankly, could be argued to be the best-looking sport watch on the market.

Dauwalter said her hope was to “come up with a way to add joy to our wrist so that we can have just that little extra teammate with us during those hardest moments. And when I said that in the meeting [with Suunto], I didn’t even really know what I meant by, ‘Let’s add joy to this watch.’ But what the Suunto design team did was brilliant.”

The designers took a lot of inspiration from Dauwalter’s personality and her success in the sport. She said her favorite features on the Race S are the offline maps (she called the maps of her home state of Colorado world’s above anything else prior), the Climb Guidance feature for recognizing elevation changes on a route, time in motion, current mile pace, altitude and total climbing during an activity.

Overall the Race S has six designs for the stainless steel Race S and two that come with the titanium, in addition to the special design made with Dauwalter.

Now that Dauwalter has recently wrapped up the 2024 race season with a win at the Nice Côte d’Azur 100 in France, she’s aiming to embrace the offseason with biking, walking and even some yoga. But as 2025 comes together, as Suunto continues to reconnect with its core trail running audience and further engages in its partnership with the UTMB race series, it’s almost certain we can expect more glowing wrists out on the nightly trails at these major races.