How do I calculate my training paces?
Training Paces
You do not need a lab test, a subscription, or a new watch. You need one honest recent result and a bit of arithmetic.
The short answer
Take your most recent honest race or time trial, work out your pace per kilometre, then apply these adjustments:
- Easy: 10km pace + 60 to 90 sec/km
- Steady: 10km pace + 25 to 40 sec/km
- Marathon pace: 10km pace + 15 to 25 sec/km
- Threshold: 10km pace + 0 to 8 sec/km
- VO2max / interval: 10km pace − 25 to 30 sec/km
- Repetition / speed: 10km pace − 45 to 55 sec/km
Recalculate every 6 to 10 weeks, or after any race that surprises you.
Step one: get an honest input
Everything downstream depends on this, so it is worth doing properly.
The best input is a race in the last six weeks over 5km, 10km or a half marathon. Second best is a solo time trial. Third best — and it works fine — is a parkrun or a hard club session where you genuinely emptied the tank.
What does not work is your 5km personal best from four years ago, or a Strava segment you nailed once with a tailwind and fresh legs. Training paces built off a fantasy number produce sessions you cannot complete, which produces a runner who thinks they are failing when the maths was simply wrong.
If you have no recent race at all, run a 30-minute time trial on a flat, honest route. Warm up properly, then run as hard as you can hold evenly for 30 minutes. Your average pace over the final 20 minutes is a very good approximation of threshold pace, and you can work everything else off that.
Step two: do the arithmetic
Say you ran 10km in 50:00. That is 5:00 per kilometre.
| Zone | Adjustment | Your pace |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | +60 to 90 sec | 6:00 – 6:30 /km |
| Steady | +25 to 40 sec | 5:25 – 5:40 /km |
| Marathon | +15 to 25 sec | 5:15 – 5:25 /km |
| Threshold | +0 to 8 sec | 5:00 – 5:08 /km |
| VO2max | −25 to 30 sec | 4:30 – 4:35 /km |
| Repetition | −45 to 55 sec | 4:05 – 4:15 /km |
Note that every zone is a range, not a number. That is deliberate. Pace is a guide to effort, not a target to chase to the second.
Step three: sanity-check against effort
Numbers are only useful if they match reality. Run each zone once and check it against the effort scale:
- Easy — 3 to 4 out of 10. Full sentences, comfortable to the end.
- Steady — 5 to 6. Short sentences. Working but sustainable for a long time.
- Marathon — 6. Controlled. You could hold this for hours, and you will have to.
- Threshold — 7. Comfortably hard. Short phrases only.
- VO2max — 8 to 9. Hard. Talking is out.
- Repetition — 9. Fast but relaxed, well short of a sprint, with full recovery.
If the maths and the effort disagree, trust the effort and adjust the maths. The formula is a starting point built off averages, and you are not an average.
Coach's note
Every athlete I coach gets an RPE reference card alongside their paces, and it is not decoration. In Wellington the pace number is wrong more often than it is right — a southerly, the climb out of Ngaio Gorge, an exposed stretch on Cobham Drive, and suddenly a perfectly executed threshold rep reads 20 seconds slow. The runners who improve fastest here are the ones who learn to run the effort and use the pace as evidence afterwards, rather than the other way round. Fitness is not being tested by the wind, it is being obscured by it.
What about the online calculators?
They are fine, and I use them as a cross-check. The well-known equivalency tables and pace calculators — the ones based on race-time prediction models — will get you within a few seconds per kilometre of the table above.
Two cautions. First, race-time equivalence assumes you have trained appropriately for the longer distance. A sharp 5km runner's "predicted" marathon time is a prediction of what they could run on marathon training, not what they will run off 40km a week. Second, the further you extrapolate, the shakier it gets. A 5km time predicting a marathon is a much longer leap than a half marathon predicting a marathon.
There is a pace calculator on this site that does the arithmetic for you, if you would rather not do it by hand.
The 30-minute test, step by step
- Pick a flat, honest route with no traffic stops. The waterfront or the Petone Esplanade both work.
- Warm up: 15 minutes easy, then 4 x 20 second strides.
- Run 30 minutes as hard as you can hold evenly. Do not go out fast.
- Take your average pace for minutes 10 to 30. That is your threshold.
- Cool down 10 minutes easy. Build your other zones off that number.
How often to update
Every 6 to 10 weeks in a training block, or after any race that tells you something new.
Do not update after one good session. A single flying Tuesday tells you the wind was behind you or you slept well, not that you have moved up a gear. Do not update after one bad session either. Fitness does not disappear in a week.
The signal is a pattern: three or four weeks of sessions where the prescribed paces feel consistently easier than they should. That is real, and it is time to move.
One caution about precision
I have seen runners agonise over whether their threshold is 4:22 or 4:25. It does not matter. The difference in training effect between those two numbers is somewhere near zero, and the mental cost of policing it is real.
Get in the right zone, run consistently, do it for months. The gains come from the repetition, not the decimal places.
