Running Pace Calculator (min/km and min/mile)
Convert a distance and time into pace per kilometre and per mile, plus speed — with split times for common race distances.
Finish times at this pace
| Distance | Finish time |
|---|
Running pace
Pace is the inverse of speed: instead of "how far per hour", it's "how long per kilometre". Runners think in pace because it's what you actually hold during a run and what race plans are written in.
pace = time / distance · speed = distance / time
Pace and speed move in opposite directions
A lower pace is faster, while a higher speed is faster — which is why mixing the two units causes confusion. 5:00 per kilometre is 12 km/h; speed up to 4:30 per kilometre and you're at 13.3 km/h. The pace number went down as you got quicker.
Converting between km and miles
Pace per mile is always the larger number, since a mile is longer: multiply the per-kilometre pace by 1.609. A 5:00/km pace is about 8:03/mile. Getting this backwards is a classic error when reading training plans written for the other unit.
Worked example
Running 10 km in 50 minutes is 3000 seconds over 10 km, so 300 seconds — five minutes — per kilometre, or 12 km/h. Held for a full marathon that same pace would give a finish of about 3 hours 31 minutes, which the table above works out for every common race distance.
A note on race predictions
The finish times above assume you hold exactly this pace throughout. In practice pace fades over longer distances — most runners can't sustain their 10 km pace for a marathon — so treat the longer projections as an upper bound rather than a target.