I just launched a new web app: a simple and fast race-pace calculator!
🏃♀️ Try out my new race pace calculator here! 🏃♂️
After crunching pace-to-race and race-to-pace calculations by hand for about the millionth time, I decided I needed a fast and easy way to quickly play around with different paces and target race times.
There are tons of race pace calculators out there on the internet already, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. Often I want to quickly iterate on different paces or race times, or toggle back and forth between goal time and goal pace.
For example, if a runner I’m coaching has done some workouts that suggest their marathon pace might be around 6:55–6:48/mi, I often do something like this:
How fast is 6:55/mi for the marathon? It's 3:01:21. What about 6:48/mi? That's 2:58:17. It’d be nice to get under 3:00, how fast is that? It’s 6:52/mi. Is that 6:52 exactly? No it's actually 6:51.9. Ok, let's try some workouts in the next few weeks around 6:51-6:49/mi and see how that pace range feels.
With other race pace calculators, this iteration was just too slow. So, I built this calculator to make it fast and easy to play around like this, even on your smartphone.
My new calculator supports both “forward” and “backward” pace calculations: for example, you can see what pace per mile you need to maintain to run a 21:45 5k, or you can see what resulting race time you get if you maintain 4:25/km for the half marathon.
You can choose from a wide range of common distances for road running, indoor track, outdoor track, and cross-country. In addition, the calculator also supports custom race distances and custom split distances—so if you have a workout loop that’s exactly 612 meters around, you can get exact per-loop paces.
Best of all, your custom race and pace distances (plus all other settings) are saved for next time: when you come back two days from now, your 612 meter loop will still be set as the custom pace distance. If you want to go back to the default settings, there’s also a reset button at the bottom.
It also has some handy other features, like the ability to toggle whether or not you want to see decimals in your splits and race results (which is handy for planning track workouts and for setting goal times for shorter distances).
If you have any feedback, find any bugs, or want to see any new features, let me know. As with all my calculator apps, this calculator is 100% free and open-source—the source code is here on GitHub.
🏃♀️ Try out the race pace calculator yourself 🏃♂️
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If you're training for a marathon (or thinking of training for one), you'll definitely want to check out my new book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone. It lays out a comprehensive, modern approach to running your best marathon ever, complete with five training plans that span a wide range of mileage levels.
For international readers, there is also a brand-new Metric Edition with all workouts and paces in kilometers!
