How to find your training Paces using McMillan Running Calculator

7 May 2020 - By Scott Darney

 

For those of you that don’t know what your paces are over all distances and would like to be more specific about their training paces, I would recommend that you use the following website and strategy:

https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/

This is the how I personally calculate my training pace ranges for my marathon training cycle.

If you go to the Calculator and enter the folllwing details:

Step 1: What is your goal?”

Most runners have goal times and distances that they have either short term or long term. I have both! For this field put in a short term goal for a distance that you would like to achieve within the next few months.
Hint: perhaps think about a 5k target as we have some TTs planned for May-July.

Step 2: What is your current fitness level?

Fortunately, lots of us participated in the SD Championships so we have some recent time trial results that can tell us what our current fitness level should be. Enter either your most recent TT result or your most recent race result. Do not to put your PB from 3 years ago if it’s unlikely you would get near this today!

This will give you 2 lists of times.

Current Times:

These are prediced times/paces for each distance based on your current fitness (note this is just a guide and does not garauntee you can achieve these results).

Goal Times:

These are the times/paces for each distance that you should be able to achieve if you reach your goal pace.

Write down your paces for the main distances (5k, 10k, HM, Mar) as these are the main distances that you train at.

As an example, you might have a target to run 5k in 25 minutes, with a curret fitness level based on the 5 mile TT time of 43:00.

This would give you:
8:03mm – 5k goal pace
8:21mm – 5k current fitness pace

So your 5k training pace range is 8:03-8:21mm.

The same chart will give you your training paces for each distances which are shown below:

5k – 8:03-8:21mm
10k – 8:21-8:40mm
HM – 8:50-9:10mm
Marathon – 9:18-9:39mm

Armed with this information, you can now give yourself a training pace range for each distance. The reason you would do this is because it is very difficult to run exactly at your training pace, especially at the fast end and especially if for any reason you are not at your best (only the medeocre are always at their best!). Instead of ending a workout being disappointed that you are 1-2 seconds slower than required, you can be happy that you were within your target training range and that you will benefit from the workout.

Please note that this is purely for guidence only as I know that some of you will not know what kind of pace to aim for when we prescribe a pace based on race distance. Also if you have methods already in place which are working then feel free to stick to your own methods.

If you have any questions please let me know.

Thanks,

Scott