Pace setting

It’s one thing taking that big leap to booking a marathon…. But how do you plan to train and actually run at a set goal pace?

There’s a few ways of doing this and I’ll start with a vague way of working out your finish time. This theory of predicting your marathon finish time is called YASSO 800s.

How this works is, you complete 10 x 800m with your rest time being half of your work time. Whatever your average time is for the 800s, you add a couple of dominations and there’s your predicted finish time.

For example, if the average time it took you to complete the 800s was 2 minutes and 58 seconds, then in theory your marathon time will be around 2 hours 58 minutes.

Obviously, there is a big difference between 800 metres and a marathon but some people do use these alongside a structured marathon plan.

The second way of gauging roughly where your marathon time is, is by using previous races to work out roughly what time you should finish.

A good way of doing this, is looking at a recent Half Marathon you have run, doubling the time it took you to finish and adding 15 minutes which should allow for the extra distance you will be running.

Some people add as little as 6 minutes when using this method so it does depend on marathon experience.

Another good way of predicting your marathon finish time is using the Jack Daniels method, where you can input your finish time from any race distance you’ve done recently and it’ll give you a predicted time for every distance from 5km to marathon. The link for this website is here https://vdoto2.com/calculator/ .

Whichever method you go with, the sooner you know what pace you need to be running at, the better.

It’ll give you a clearer image in your head and will hopefully stop you from going too fast or too slow in your training runs.