I’ve really been trying to get better at pacing. (How many times have you seen me mention that I was going too fast and wore myself out too quickly?) There’s lots of online pacing calculators out there, but I really like the McMillan Running Calculator because not only does it tell you what your pace should be on race day, but also what pace your training runs should be at.

You plug in recent race data. I’m plugging in a 35 minute 5k, even though I can run it faster than that. But I know I can do 35 minutes pretty consistently now and the one mile pace it lists is very close to my one mile PR.

As you can see, if I keep training at this same level, I should be able to run about 1:13 at my 10k in July and 2:42 at my half marathon in January. You can also enter a goal race pace to see what you should aim for, but for now, I just want to mainly focus on endurance over speed.

The training paces is where it gets really interesting. There are several different types of training runs you can do. The majority of all runs should be easy runs, which are done around 1-2 min/mile slower than race pace. Long runs should be done once a week or once every other week and they are mainly to build endurance and should be ran fairly slow. In my case, around a 13 min/mile. Recovery runs are done after hard workouts to help you recover (wonder where they got the name…) and are the slowest of all your runs. In my case, this is called walking, as I find it impossible to run that slow. Tempo runs are meant to increase speed over time, and these are what the majority of runs tend to fall into, which leaves my heart rate soaring and me horribly out of breath at the end.

Here’s the average paces for my last 20 runs:

Most of these are not just straight runs, but run/walk intervals. I starred all the ones that had no walk breaks at all. And you can see that none of them fall into the “endurance pace” I should be running; they are all at least 1 min/mile faster. Even the ones with walk breaks don’t fall into that pace category, which means my running sections were probably way too fast (and no wonder I needed the walk breaks!).

I really try to slow myself down, especially as I start training for longer distances and doing regular long runs. I just find it so hard because it feels like I’m crawling and like it almost takes more energy to go that slow. Does anyone have any tips?