Know your paces.
Put in a recent run and tell us how hard it actually was. We’ll estimate what you could race at other distances, and the training paces that go with it.
What you could race
Equivalent efforts at other distances — assuming you actually trained for them.
| Distance | Time |
|---|
Your training paces
Four gears. Most runners only ever use one, and spend far too much time in the wrong one.
These are estimates, not instructions. They come from one performance, projected with a standard formula. The further the jump from what you actually ran, the looser the estimate — a marathon predicted from a 5K assumes months of marathon training you may not have done.
Your body outranks the calculator. Heat, humidity, hills, sleep and stress all move these numbers, sometimes by a lot. On an easy run the talk test still wins: if you can’t speak a full sentence, slow down no matter what the watch says.
The model cannot see what kind of runner you are. It assumes an average balance of speed and endurance. If you have fast legs and a thin aerobic base, you will beat the short predictions and miss the long ones — and the other way round if you are built for distance. If a number looks wrong, it probably is: feed it a recent maximal effort closer to that distance.
New to running? Ignore most of this for now. Run easy, run consistently, and come back to it in a few months — the paces will have moved anyway.
General fitness guidance, not medical advice.
Easy days easy. Hard days hard.
The most common mistake in running is spending every day in the murky middle — too hard to recover from, too easy to get faster. Aim for roughly four out of every five miles genuinely easy, and let the hard days actually be hard.
Not sure where you fit?
Come talk to us. We’ll look at what you’ve been running and tell you honestly whether you need more speed or just more patience.
Starting from scratch?
You don’t need paces yet — you need a plan. Our Intro to Running plan gets you to thirty continuous minutes in eight weeks.