Training Pace Calculator

What the training pace calculator does

Good training is not about running every session at the same speed. Different workouts are meant to be run at different paces, and getting those paces right is most of what separates training that works from training that just tires you out. This tool sorts that out for you. You give it one recent run, a distance and the time it took, and it hands back five paces to train at: easy, tempo, VO2 max, speed, and long run.

In other words, a single honest effort tells the calculator how fit you are right now, and from that it works out the right pace for each kind of session in your week.

How to use it

1. Enter a recent run. Put in the distance and the time of a run you have done lately, ideally a hard effort or a race, since that reflects your current fitness best.
2. Read your five paces. The easy, tempo, VO2 max, speed, and long run paces fill in below, each with its own unit you can switch to minutes per kilometer or per mile.

The Reset button clears everything when you want to enter a fresh result.

How your paces are worked out

Behind the scenes it uses a well established method from the running coach Jack Daniels, built around a single fitness number often called VDOT. From your recent run it works out roughly how much oxygen your body is using to run at that speed, adjusts for how long you were able to hold it, and lands on that one fitness number. Then each training pace is simply a set effort level off that number: easy and long runs sit well below it, tempo runs just under your threshold, and the VO2 max and speed paces above it. You do not have to follow any of that math. You enter one run, and the five paces come out the other side, scaled to where your fitness actually is.

The five paces, and what each one is for

Each pace has a job. Mixing them is what builds a rounded runner.

• Easy. The pace for most of your running. Comfortable, conversational, the speed that builds your aerobic base without beating you up. This should make up the bulk of your week.
• Long run. Slower still, or about the same easy effort held for longer. It teaches your body to keep going and to burn fuel efficiently over distance.
• Tempo. Comfortably hard, the pace you could just about hold for an hour. It lifts the effort you can sustain before your legs start to flood, which is the engine of distance running.
• VO2 max. Hard interval pace, run in repeats with recovery between them. This is what stretches your top-end aerobic ceiling.
• Speed. Short, fast repetitions for sharpness and running economy, run with full recovery so each one is quick and clean.

The mistake almost every runner makes

If you take one thing from this page, take this. The most common training error, by a mile, is running easy days too fast. It feels productive to push, so the easy run creeps up to a medium effort, and the hard sessions, run on tired legs, end up too slow. The result is a week of runs that are all roughly the same middling pace, which trains nothing in particular.

The fix is to respect the gap between these paces. Easy genuinely means easy, slow enough to hold a conversation, even if your ego protests. Then on the hard days you will have the legs to hit the quick paces properly. Easy days easy, hard days hard, is one of the oldest pieces of running wisdom there is, and the paces here only help if you actually let the easy ones be easy.

An example with real numbers

Say you recently raced a 5 km in 25 minutes. Feed that in, and the five paces spread out across roughly a minute and a half per kilometer.

• Your easy and long paces sit down at the slow end of that spread
• Your tempo pace lands in the comfortably-hard middle
• Your VO2 max and speed paces sit up at the quick end

The exact numbers are personal to your result, which is the whole point. What matters is the spread itself: that easy pace really is meant to feel a good deal slower than the speed pace, not a few seconds off it. The tool gives you the figures, and the gap between them is your training plan in miniature.

Questions people ask

What run should I enter?

A recent hard effort or a race gives the most honest read of your fitness. An easy jog will understate where you are. The fresher and harder the run, the better the paces it produces.

Why are there five different paces?

Because different workouts develop different things. Easy and long runs build your aerobic base, tempo lifts the pace you can hold, and the VO2 max and speed paces sharpen your top end. Running them all at one speed develops none of them well.

My easy pace feels too slow. Is that right?

Almost certainly yes. Easy is supposed to feel easy, slow enough to chat. Most runners run their easy days too hard, which leaves them too tired to hit the quick paces on the days that count.

How often should I update my paces?

Whenever your fitness clearly shifts, such as after a new race result or a solid block of training. As you get fitter, a faster recent run will move all five paces along with it.

References

1. Daniels, J. (2014). Daniels' Running Formula (3rd ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. The VDOT system used to derive training paces from a recent performance.
2. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Special Publication 811: Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI). https://www.nist.gov/pml/special-publication-811