The McMillan Running Calculator is a very nifty little tool that will let you know your equivalent (estimated) race time for different distances based upon a recent race you ran at a different distance. It is surprisingly accurate, as well.
Since the mid-1990’s, I’ve been working on a method that estimates your equivalent race performances using a current race time at any distance as well as giving the appropriate pace range for all the different types of workouts that you perform. […] Naturally, knowing what you could run at an upcoming race based on a recent performance can help take the guesswork out of your race planning. You’ll be able to set more realistic race goals and judge an appropriate race pace better. The results are performances that are more consistent and fewer crappy races.
The site is fairly simple. You enter the hours, minutes, and seconds of a recent race performance and tell it what the distance was. It will then tell you your equivalent times at everything from the 100m up to the marathon. He does say, however, that the 100m through 500m times are “for fun” since he hasn’t got a reliable method for predicting those times.
The numbers will never be exact, since the equivalent times assume that you would also train yourself for those different distances before actually racing them, and things like terrain, weather, health, and diet are not figured into it at all. The site is great as a rough estimate and and as a way to set realistic goals that can be very useful for training.
Putting in my best 5k time from this year brings me to around where I want to be in the Marathon, which is about 10 minutes faster than I did run it this year. I am not quite sure which races I am going to run next year, but I had already set this as a goal time for myself and now I am going to try to use his suggestions for times to base off of for my training for next year.
Sounds great. Once you decide on your races for next year, are you game enough to post predicted + actual times for an upcoming race?
I could do that, yeah. I am not so sure which races I am going to run next year yet; there is one that I will definately run come hell or high water, but the rest I won’t decide on until I figure out at least the first marathon of the season. I am also not sure how good my powers of prediction will be if I am too far ahead of the game. I usually know when I reach the start line what I am capable of on any given day, but it could be fun to try and predict.
interesting…may have to try this out.
I put just to test this calculator out, a time of 10 seconds on 100 m (just a test value to see if this calculator is any good). With a time of 10 seconds I could maybe have reached the semifinal in the Olympics. Well, when I put this time in the calculator, I found that I also would have been able to run a marathon on 1 hour 54 minutes and 37 seconds. The present world record is 2h03:59 set by Haile Gebrselassie in the Berlin Marathon in 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon#World_records_and_world.27s_best -- So with this in mind I’m not very impressed by this calculator
I personally can’t think of any world class 100m runners that immediately convert their training to marathon training -- I don’t think that that is an accurate test since running 100m in 10 seconds is pretty difficult.
That said, I’ve never used it w/a 100m time. I’ve tested it w/1 mile times and 5k times (or longer races to look at those shorter distances) and have found it to be pretty close to the mark for the average (or slightly above average) runner.
Having never been or coached a world class athlete, it never occurred to me to test those sorts of numbers.