CC Recommends: Marathon Watches
The ‘Real Deal Holyfield’ Military Watch
We spend a lot of time here talking about collectible vintage watches. So why focus now on Marathon timepieces? They only really got popular in the late 80s and early 90s, basically after they were purpose-built for soldiers in the Canadian and U.S. armies. Hundreds of thousands have been produced, so they’re not especially collectible.
The movements aren’t anything special, usually ETA Swiss high-torque quartz or an equivalent automatic. They’re not made of precious metals; in fact, many Marathon cases aren’t even metal at all. (To save weight and cost, many of ’em are injection-molded from high-impact composite a.k.a. plastic.) Most are not especially waterproof, as only the diver-specific Marathons are made for marine environments.
So why Marathon? Because they are the real deal.
All of these fancy watch companies are building and hyping up watches with hundreds or thousands of meters worth of water resistance. Cases built of titanium or carbon fiber. Hand-decorated automatic movements with silicon springs. It’s all mainly for show. If a soldier or stuntman or an adventurer in modern times uses a watch, it’s usually a G-Shock. Or maybe one of these.
Marathon watches have everything you need, and not much else. Military personnel have a need for night visibility, so all Marathon watches have tritium tubes that will at least last for a decade or so, not unlike Luminox watches. The designs are also very spartan and tactical; they were basically created by soldiers, for soldiers.
There are three types; the ‘general purpose’ Marathon that is a sort of field watch, the ‘navigator’ which has an external bezel and a beefed-up case, and the ‘diver’ which of course looks like what basically every diving watch looks like.
The G.P. is 34mm, and can be ordered in a stainless steel case or a range of colored composite plastics. These colors of course match camouflage patterns for soldiers’ work uniforms; Marathon calls the colors ‘black,’ ‘sage green,’ and ‘desert tan.’ The field watches have a 50m water resistance.
The Navigator is a beefy watch; calipers place measurements at almost 44mm with crown. Just to the edges of the case is more like 42 or 43mm. It has an asymmetric look not unlike the famous Benrus field watches or the British CWC flyers’ chronographs. The crown on the Navigator screws down, making it waterproof to 6ATM, or about 200 feet.
The Diver is the only watch of the three that can be ordered in different sizes. You can grab it in ‘Medium’ at 36mm, ‘Large’ at 41mm, and ‘Jumbo’ at 46mm. No matter the size, they all have screw-down crowns and a full complement of gaskets to keep things watertight to 300m. The dive watch is also the only Marathon model that can also can be ordered with an ‘arctic white’ watch face instead of government-issue black. Some catalogs refer to the dive watch as the S.A.R., meaning ‘search and rescue.’
One thing: not unlike the Seiko SKX013, the smaller sizes are still fairly bulky and thick. There’s a reason for this; the bezels were meant to be easily operable even with gloves, and the cases are tall, yet in many cases only hold thin quartz movements. This creates a rather wide rehaut.
Speaking of government-issue, just as if you were ordering thousands for your army or militia in whatever country you reside, you can choose to customize the watch in small ways. Namely, you can ask for an automatic or quartz movement, you can ask for a date aperture on the dial or not, and you can customize the dial.
You can usually get Marathon watches with their name and/or ‘U.S. Government’ on the dial, or go with a logoless stealth look. Sometimes they can also be purchased with various military regiment or branch logos on the dials, but these are of course made in more limited numbers.
So be honest with yourself. Are you really gonna take that giant watch that costs as much as a car diving? Do you really want a watch that was built for extreme situations? Then you probably want a G-Shock, a Seiko, or one of these. And to be honest, that’s what makes these cool; they’re the real thing.
