Pace

What pace is that finish time?

"What pace is a four-hour marathon?" is one of the most-searched questions in running, and the pages that answer it are mostly a single number in a big font, undated, unattributed, sitting above a hundred-row chart nobody reads.

The number is the easy part. Four hours over 42.195 km is 5:41/km, or 9:09/mi. You can do that division yourself. What the number does not tell you is the part that decides your race: what that pace has to feel like at kilometre 5 when it is easy and you are surrounded by people going faster, where you should be at halfway, and what your watch will say when the course measures long — as it almost always does.

So each page in this set gives the pace, then the things the pace implies. The full split table in both kilometres and miles. The halfway target on even pace, and the slightly slower halfway that a two-percent negative split asks for. The specific pace you need on your watch screen once you account for the one to one-and-a-half percent of extra distance a GPS trace typically records over a certified course — the reason so many people run the right average pace and finish two minutes late.

Every page also carries a paragraph about that particular time: who tends to run it, what the training behind it usually looks like, and the failure mode that specific goal is prone to. A 3:30 marathon fails differently from a 5:00 marathon, and pretending otherwise is how generic pace charts waste your time.

The set is deliberately small. There is one page per finish time that people actually search for, each one written rather than generated from a template with the numbers swapped, and it grows only when there is evidence someone is looking for a time we have not covered. A thousand near-identical pages would rank for a while and help nobody.

If your goal time is not here yet, the pace calculator does any distance and any time, with the same splits and the same halfway maths.