Author’s Note – 17-12-16:
Since writing the below I have had more experience running on trails and woodland paths in bad weather at night – the true test of whether a light is good enough to see where you’re going. As such, I feel I must acknowledge – particularly as this post seems to get quite a bit of traffic, that I am no longer using the LED Lenser Neo Headlight for most of my winter night runs. It’s fine even in the darkest places if the ground is even and well-surfaced, but treacherous on rough ground with tree roots as it’s just too white and not bright enough for the eye to be able to distinguish them – being white light your eye is only using the rods on your retina and half your sight is blind. A slightly yellower or a brighter light allows the cones in your retina to come into play and depth perception is so much easier.
The LED Lenser is absolutely fine for road running – you’ll be seen a mile off by all around you, however they’re travelling, and fine for good trails in the dark where you only need to be able to see that you’re still comfortably on the path, there are no trees on it and there’s not a crocodile lying in the middle of it. It’s also a lot smaller and lighter than what I use for completely dark running.
Personally, I am now using the GRDE 2014 headlamp – a 2000 lumens waterproof number with rechargeable batteries and a ‘brightest’ setting life of about 2 hours continuous use on 2x 18650 batteries before it starts to be noticeably less effective than it was (but still fine for decent paths with no street lights). There are several similar versions available – such as this one, but I have not expressly tried this model myself. They’re not usually bank breakers anyway – I spent a grand total of £16 on mine and wouldn’t change it.
The Nathan LightSpur and LightBender below, I still swear by – I’ve been using them for 2 winters now and have only just needed to change the batteries and I always get good feedback about how visible they are from a large distance away even when I’m not also wearing my like-the-sun headtorch.
The original review can be found below:
When the winter started coming in, rather than investing in a tonne of reflective gear I went for lights – some of the routes I run are not lit with street-lights, and while the reflective gear works great when a car comes nearby, they’re not worth anything from a distance, or if the other traffic is cyclists or pedestrians. I have a head-light for when I’m out by myself or not running in town where the street lighting is frequent, and some lower intensity body lights for running with a group or in well-lit places. I bought all my lights from Amazon,
First up – the LED Lenser Neo Headlight
We use LED Lenser torches at work – this one has three different light settings. There are two lights on the headset – a solid white light on the front and a red flashing light on the back. You cycle through them by pushing the button on the top of the front light. The first setting has just the front light on its brightest setting, the second and third settings have the front light at two brightnesses – the same as setting 1, and a dimmer one, and the red light on the back set to flash.
Blue Runnings 