Training Pace Calculator
One honest, recent 5K effort is enough to anchor a whole training week. This calculator turns it into easy, marathon, tempo, interval and repetition pace ranges.
Your numbers
Minutes : seconds — from a race or a hard, even time trial.
Result
How it works
The ranges scale from your 5K pace by the ratios coaches have used for decades. Easy running lands around 30–40% slower per kilometre than 5K pace — slow enough to hold a conversation in full sentences. Tempo pace sits just slower than 10K effort, at the edge where conversation shrinks to short phrases. Intervals are run at about 5K pace itself, and repetitions faster still, with full recoveries so speed never turns sloppy.
These ratios assume the 5K was a genuine effort on a fair course. Anchor them to a soft performance — a hot day, a hilly course, a jogged parkrun — and every pace it produces will be too easy or too hard in the same direction.
Good practice & limits
- Run easy days at the slow end of the easy range. Most amateurs run their easy days too fast and their hard days too slow, and end up with neither.
- Re-anchor every 6–8 weeks with a new 5K or a race at another distance converted to one.
- On hills, run the effort, not the pace: let the watch be wrong on climbs and descents will repay you.