Pacing yourself

paulocon

Hi,

Recently got back into running and have been playing around with some varying distances.

One question that came to mind is how you learn to pace yourself, i.e. how do you figure out what tempo to start off/finish up with.

I've played around running 5km (fast start/slow finish, slow start/fast finish etc) to varying effect and have also ran longer distances (12 miles) but am just wondering if pacing/tempo is something that comes with practice or if there is a theoretical approach that can be taken?

tyler71

I'm not an expert but if you want to get a rough idea take a look at the Macmillan running calculator http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/mcmillanrunningcalculator.html it gives you an idea of the paces you should be running for different sessions but you need to have raced a distance to give yourself something to work off, maybe a local Christmas fun run to give yourself an idea. However, don't follow these slavishly, you should also look into using Heartrate and just how hard a session feels so there's no substitute for just getting out there and trying out different paces.

Andrewf20

Ive done a bit of personal trial and error on this by trying different ways of varying the THREADMILL speed over a 5k distance. Whats seems to work best for me is something like this:

0km - 0.5km - 16.2km/h
0.5km - 3km - 16.6km/h
3km - 4.5km - 17km/h Here comes the pain
4.5km-4.75km - 17.4km/h
4.75-5km - 20km/h

I find that going too hard too early and feeling in bits by half distance is too much of a mental burden so I find that ramping the speed as the distance diminishes helps when things get painful about 4km into the run.

Out in the real world it gets more complicated with hills but I always ease off slightly on the flat for maybe 100-200m before the hill and that seems to work best for me.

catweazle

What time does that equate to for the overall 5k Andrew, that looks well under 20 minutes to me.....the treadmill i use cant even go over 16k i think let alone start off on it

plodder

Pace obviously varies depending on the individual. So, one way to approach it is to set your pace based on heart rate. There's loads of literature out there on training zones, and how to work them out. You'd need a heart rate monitor then to see what pace is appropriate for each type of workout.