One for One (A Second Time)

Pelagos FXD x 31 days

Back in the winter of 2022, I wrote about my experience wearing one watch for one month straight. Then I was in a honeymoon phase with a new Omega Seamaster, the white ceramic dial version, and I wore it for everything from exercise to sleeping to showering to diving under the ice. I never took it off, for over 30 days. For those of you who read Swimpruf who aren’t watch enthusiasts, this concept of wearing one watch for a month might seem a bit confusing, or perhaps a very low bar to set for one’s self, hardly worthy of writing about. But for the watch collector, the mere mention of not changing a watch regularly can make the palms (wrist?) sweat and presents a legitimate challenge. I fall somewhere in between, and I’ve written about it more than a few times, here and elsewhere.

I’ve written before that if my house burned down and I had to exit in a hurry, as long as I had one of my watches on, I’d be content to see the others melt into ingots of steel and titanium. I also hold the notion of owning and wearing a single good watch a sort of Platonic ideal, something to aspire to. Most of my watches could easily be worn 24/7 comfortably and durably, and there is little reason to own more than one, other than out of some hoarding instinct or a poor head for personal finance. And yet, I find myself with a modest collection. So consider the challenge of “one watch for one month” the equivalent of Dry January, a kind of reset or forced restraint. Now I’m doing it again.

At the beginning of this year, on The Grey NATO podcast, James and I held a sort of mock “tournament” in which, over the course of a few weeks, pitted watches in our own collections against each other until only one was left. That “winner” was one we agreed we would each then wear for one full month straight. After some tough choices, I settled on my Tudor Pelagos FXD, a watch I had earlier declared just about as perfect (for me, at least) a watch as exists today. You can read my rationale for such a declaration here, but the TL;DR is, it won’t be a hardship to wear this one 24/7/31. The Pelagos FXD is comfortable, rugged, handsome, visually interesting without being ostentatious, highly functional and accurate.

My previous “one watch” experiment, January, 2022.

All of those traits also applied to the Seamaster I wore for a month back in 2022, but that watch is now long gone from my collection. In the end, it simply felt too “precious” with the white ceramic “wave” dial, shiny bezel, and polished skeletonized hands. While it would be a fine “one watch,” and I wore it a lot, it didn’t last more than a year with me. When you start to play the hypothetical game of “what if” with your watches, the little things matter. Things that are minor annoyances or design features that you can overlook for a while might weigh more heavily if you think you’d be looking at it day in and day out. I think with only a couple of sentimental exceptions (e.g., my rather dressy anOrdain Model 1, my fragile, vintage Breitling) I view every watch in my collection as a potential “one watch.” Because you just never know. And that leads to some brutal editing of the collection.

If the Pelagos FXD has one shortcoming, it is its inability to take conventional straps or a metal band, due to its case design with milled slots for sliding through one-piece straps. However, I don’t see this as a shortcoming. In fact, it is what drew me to this version of the Pelagos over the others (the original, the 39, or now the Ultra): the singularity of its purpose, the utter form/function design, and the feel of it in the hand: a smooth, rounded puck of titanium without those fragile little pins and sharp lugs. Besides, I have one-piece leather, rubber, and nylon straps aplenty, so variety won’t be a concern, and when you plan to wear a watch for 31 days straight, variety is key.

At least I can accessorize appropriately this month.

This is the time of year when I tend to think less about my watches in general. The days are long, often sweaty, often dirty. I live in T-shirts and shorts and seldom socks. It’s light from 5am until 9pm and I am outside for most of it, gardening, running, biking, kayaking, and swimming. There’s not the idle time at a desk to be perusing a watch collection. I can’t be bothered by watch choices when I jump out of bed. I just want to pull on my shorts, slip into my Birkenstocks, and get out the door. A lightweight, titanium watch on a soft velcro strap is just about perfect. It’s the grownup version of something you might wear as a kid, with little regard for it other than the occasional time check. I want this one to get scratched up, the band to get stained, the bezel to get jammed with mud and sand, and my wrist to get a Pelagos-shaped tan line by the end of June.

I realize that, as challenges go, this is not up there with last year’s Fan Dance, but it will be a fun diversion at a time of year that should be largely about fun. For those of you who also suffer from the same horological hoarding dysfunction as me, why not join in? Pick one from your collection and play along. By the end of the month, you might view that watch differently, or maybe even the rest of your collection. And maybe even learn a little something about yourself.