With Coach Kelvin, offering Online Running Coaching for We Run and the We Run Virtual Running Club, and 1:1 Running Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas.
Hi folks, it’s Kelvin here. We Run Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas as well as online coaching.
In this little video, I’m going to share some thoughts on how to work out what time a runner is likely to do in an event.
It’s a question that I get asked on a fairly regular basis from friends, runners I coach, and online. Often it’s something like, “In this half marathon, or whatever race it might be, what time do you think I’m going to run?”
Sometimes I feel like pulling out a crystal ball and rubbing it to see if it gives me any answers. The truth is, it is a bit of a dark art because we use quite a few different things to work it out.
What I’ll cover today is individual workouts for longer races, or in some cases, multiple workouts.
Predicting Times for 5K to Half Marathon
Let’s start with the 5K. From 5K up to half marathon it’s a little bit easier, for reasons I’ll explain.
For 5K, we could do something like six x 1K off 90 seconds recovery as a good indicator. Look at the paces on the reps and see where the runner is.
Someone with slightly less experience might do seven x 800 metres off 90 seconds recovery. Again, the paces on the reps are a good indicator.
For 10K, a classic would be 11 or 12 x 1K, off something like one minute to 90 seconds. Look at the pace of the individual reps.
For a half marathon, we might look at three x 5K.
The great thing is that all of these are good workouts that can be incorporated into training. The 5K and 10K sessions in particular can be done a couple of times, so we can start to figure out what a runner might run on race day.
Predicting Marathon Times
The challenge comes with marathons and ultra marathons, where we don’t really want to accumulate that much goal pace time in one workout because it’s too stressful. The runner probably wouldn’t be able to recover from that.
So we use more than one workout.
A classic for marathon training would be midweek, maybe on a Wednesday, with a warm-up and cool down, but seven or eight miles at marathon goal pace.
Then, maybe on the Saturday, so only two days to recover, a long run with sections at goal pace that add up to somewhere between 12 and 16 miles.
That might be the biggest week that a marathon runner does, but it gives us averages across the reps and workouts that we can use to figure out a realistic goal pace.
Predicting Ultra Marathon Times
For ultra marathons, it wouldn’t be uncommon to do the race distance and elevation over two or three days.
An example might be someone doing a 50K with elevation. Ideally, we’d match the runs to the terrain and, if possible, train on the race course itself to get some recce done.
So for a 50K, we might do a Friday, Saturday, Sunday block with 15K, 25K, and another 15K. Even with two nights of sleep between runs, recovery isn’t complete, so we can still take data from those sessions to compare with what the runner is expecting.
Learning the Feel of Race Pace
Some of this is about internalising pace or intensity – really learning what it feels like. Then we can look at the data to see if it adds up to a realistic goal race time.
Wrapping Up
There are other angles we can use to check whether the findings are accurate, but for now I’ll leave you with those workouts.
If you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below. And for now, happy running.
