How do you work out your training paces from a race time?

Why start from a race time instead of a feeling?

Perceived effort drifts. What felt hard six weeks ago might now be your easy pace, and you won't notice unless you recalibrate against something objective. A recent race—or even a hard, honest time trial—gives you a fixed data point that reflects your current fitness, not last season's or a number you've been chasing since you last ran a personal best.

How do you convert a race time into a baseline pace?

Divide your race time by the distance to get a per-mile or per-km pace. A 25-minute 5K is 5:00/km or roughly 8:03/mile. That single number becomes the anchor for every other training pace, because most of your other paces are expressed as an offset from it rather than as fixed numbers of their own.

What offsets apply to each type of run?

• Easy runs: 60–90 seconds per mile slower than race pace—this is where most of your weekly mileage should sit
• Long runs: similar to easy pace, or slightly slower in the final few miles when simulating race fatigue
• Tempo/threshold runs: 25–30 seconds per mile slower than current 5K race pace, held for 20–40 minutes
• VO2 max intervals: 15–20 seconds per mile faster than 5K pace, run in short repeats with full recovery
• Marathon/half-marathon pace: use a race-time equivalency table rather than your 5K pace directly, since aerobic endurance—not raw speed—dominates longer distances

Why doesn't 5K pace scale directly to longer races?

Speed and endurance decay at different rates as distance increases. A runner with sharp 5K speed but limited weekly mileage often can't hold the pace their 5K time would predict for a half-marathon or marathon—their aerobic base is the limiter, not their leg speed. Race-time equivalency calculators account for this by widening the pace gap as distance grows, so treat any marathon or half-marathon prediction as a starting estimate to test in training, not a fixed target.

How often should you recalculate?

Recalculate after any race or serious time trial, and at minimum every 6–8 weeks during a training block. Paces set from an out-of-date race time either undertrain you—because you've since gotten fitter—or push you into overreaching if your fitness has dipped. Treat your training paces as a living number, not a one-time calculation.

What if you don't have a recent race?

Run a time trial in race-like conditions: flat route, well-rested, no traffic lights. A 5K or 10K effort gives a cleaner signal than a training run, because you're forcing genuine effort rather than estimating from a session where you were holding back. Treat the result exactly as you would a race time and rebuild your paces from it.

Letting your paces adjust automatically

Manually recalculating every few weeks is easy to forget, and it's easy to keep training on paces that no longer match your fitness. RunV reads your logged runs and recent race results and updates your easy, tempo, and interval paces automatically, so the numbers in your plan stay matched to where you actually are, not where you were two months ago.