Last month, ~9 miles into a long slow jog, I began thinking about how to quantify the relationship between speed and distance in running. From my (admittedly idiosyncratic) experience two major semiquantitative rules of thumb emerge:

• Optimum pace varies linearly with the logarithm of distance — or putting it alternatively, range decreases exponentially with speed. In my case, empirical data suggests that every time I slow down my pace by ~1 minute/mile, I can go twice as far while still feeling good. Thus a 5km run is comfortable at ~9 minutes/mile, a 10km is best at ~10 min/mi, a half-marathon belongs at ~11 min/mi, and a full marathon ~12 min/mi.
• Every minute ahead of schedule in the first half of a run results in two minutes behind schedule at the finish line — or in other words, it's much worse to go too fast at the beginning than it is to go too slow.

Of course, these formulæ need adjustment for the three big factors that trouble me most: hills, heat, and humidity. They also should be tuned to allow for restedness versus fatigue going into an event ... for injury ... for race-day adrenaline ... and for the after-effects of reading inspirational stories of great accomplishments.

(see also LogbookTyrannicide (17 Oct 2002), HandicapJogging (8 Oct 2003), BigAndStrong (27 Aug 2004), ...)

TopicRunning - TopicScience - TopicPersonalHistory - 2004-10-18

(correlates: CelebrationOfLife, LongDistanceFriendliness, Running2006Analysis, ...)