Enter one recent race. Get the five paces your training should run on, easy to repetition, per kilometre and per mile.
mm:ss or h:mm:ss. Use an all-out race or time trial from the last 6 to 8 weeks.
| Training pace | Per km | Per mile |
|---|
On easy days, heart rate beats pace. Heat, hills and fatigue change the pace, the effort stays the same. Find your easy heart rate ceiling with the zone calculator.
Every good training plan runs on a handful of paces, each with a job. This calculator takes one recent race and gives you all of them: easy, marathon, threshold, interval and repetition.
It works by estimating the oxygen cost of your race pace, using the equations Jack Daniels and Jimmy Gilbert published in 1979. That gives a race-based VO2 score, a single number for your current running fitness. Each training pace is then a set share of that score, from roughly 62 to 70 percent for easy running up to about 105 percent for short repetitions.
They run easy days too fast and hard days too slow, and end up in the grey zone where every run feels moderately hard and nothing improves. If your easy pace from this calculator feels slow, that is the point. Run it slow enough, and the hard days get faster.
Retest every 6 to 8 weeks with a 5K or 10K. When your race time drops, every training pace moves with it.
Enter a recent race time. The calculator estimates your running fitness from it and sets each training pace as a share of that fitness: easy, marathon, threshold, interval and repetition.
An estimate of the oxygen your body uses at race pace, based on Daniels and Gilbert's equations. It is not a lab VO2max, but it tracks your running fitness well and moves when your race times improve.
Because easy running is meant to be easy. Most runners run their easy days 30 to 60 seconds per kilometre too fast, which adds fatigue without adding fitness.
Roughly the pace you could hold for about an hour in a race. In training it is used for tempo runs and cruise intervals, 20 to 40 minutes of total work.
Both. Use heart rate on easy days, where heat and hills change the pace but the effort should stay low. Use pace for threshold and intervals, where the target is a specific speed.
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Paces only work in a plan that sequences them. Andreas Almgren, the new New York Marathon champion, explains his system in Run Faster.
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