Enter the 10K time you're chasing. Back comes the pace it demands, and where the clock should read at each marker.
Estimates are for general guidance only and are not medical advice. For a personalised plan, book a free guided tour at RPM Gym.
The headline is what your goal costs per kilometre, not a forecast of what you'll run. Chasing 55 minutes means 5:30 per kilometre, which is 8:51 per mile and 10.91 km/h. Nothing about you went into that. It is 55 divided by 10, and a first-timer and a club runner get the same number.
The rows underneath are where that pace has to have put you. At 5:30/km the clock reads 5:30 at the first kilometre, 13:45 at 2.5 km, 27:30 at halfway, 41:15 at 7.5 km and 55:00 at the line. Those are the figures to check against the course signs while there is still road left to do something with.
Four checkpoints and a finish, not ten. A ten-row table stops getting read somewhere around the fourth kilometre, and a single kilometre on its own is noisy: one slow one usually means a bend, a hill or a water station rather than a problem with the pace. The 2.5 km reading catches a fast start early. The 5 km reading is the last one with half the race still in front of it.
What the table won't tell you is whether being twenty seconds up at 2.5 km is good news. It tells you that you are twenty seconds up. That is the whole service: a gap you can feel becomes a gap you can count, and the decision about it stays yours.
Pace (seconds per km) = goal time (minutes) × 60 ÷ 10 Pace per mile = pace per km × 1.609344 Speed (km/h) = 3600 ÷ pace (seconds per km) Elapsed at a checkpoint = pace (seconds per km) × checkpoint distance (km) Checkpoints: 1 km, 2.5 km, 5 km, 7.5 km, and the finish at 10 km
A runner going for 55:00 who comes through 2.5 km with the clock on 13:15.
Thirty seconds up at 2.5 km is 5:18/km, and 5:18 held to the line is 53:00, two minutes inside the goal. The table has no view on whether that is a good race or the first quarter of a bad one. It converts a clock reading into a pace, and the runner spends the remaining 7.5 km deciding what to do with that.
5:00 per kilometre, which is 8:03 per mile and a flat 12 km/h. The checkpoints land on 5:00, 12:30, 25:00, 37:30 and 50:00 — every one of them a whole or half minute, which makes it the one goal time you can carry in your head without writing anything down.
As 47.5. The field takes decimal minutes, so 47:30 is 47.5, 52:15 is 52.25 and 58:45 is 58.75. Enter 47.5 and the pace comes back at 4:45/km, with checkpoints at 4:45, 11:53, 23:45, 35:38 and 47:30.
Elapsed, all of them, counted from the start. 13:45 at 2.5 km is what a race clock reads as you pass the sign. If you want segment times instead, subtract each row from the one below it — at an even pace they all come out identical, which is exactly why the elapsed column is the more useful of the two to carry.
This page cannot tell you, and it deliberately does not try. What is on record is that most people do not: that 16,000-runner field in Oslo averaged a slower second half, and the men's 10,000 m world records went quick at both ends and steadier through the middle. Even pacing is the arithmetic the table is built from, so read it as the line you are measuring against rather than the instruction.
The sign, when the table is what you are checking against. These elapsed times are keyed to the measured course, so comparing them with a watch that has quietly added a hundred metres will tell you that you are behind when you are not. Watch for pace, markers for position.
Because that is the honest output. You typed the finish; the tool worked out what it demands and completes the column with it. Every row above the last one is new information, and the last one is a checksum. A version of this page once presented the 10 km in its own URL as a calculated result, and that is the kind of row worth being explicit about.
Yes, and it probably earns its keep there. A training run has no official clock, no signs and nobody to pull you along, which is where pace drifts hardest and least visibly. Four checkpoint times on a watch face is the cheapest way to find out how steady your steady 10K really is.
Goal paces get set from what a runner wants and tested for the first time on race morning, which is a poor order to do it in. Book a free guided tour at RPM Gym in Al Manhal and bring the times you have actually run.