Most runners have one pace. They go out the door, settle into whatever feels normal, and run that for years. It is the single biggest reason people plateau: one pace builds one quality, and fitness is built from several.
A structured plan runs at five distinct paces, each doing a job the others cannot. This guide covers what they are, how to find yours from a race you have already run, and why the easy ones matter more than the hard ones.
The five training paces at a glance
One pace does not build every quality. Each of these does a job the others cannot, which is why a good plan runs all of them.
| Pace | What it builds | How it feels | Could hold for |
|---|---|---|---|
| EasyBuilds the aerobic base and carries most of your weekly volume | Builds the aerobic base and carries most of your weekly volume | Conversational | Hours |
| MarathonRehearses race effort and teaches fuelling at goal pace | Rehearses race effort and teaches fuelling at goal pace | Steady, controlled | 2 to 4 hours |
| ThresholdRaises the pace you can hold before lactate runs away from you | Raises the pace you can hold before lactate runs away from you | Comfortably hard | About an hour |
| IntervalPushes VO2 max, your ceiling for oxygen use | Pushes VO2 max, your ceiling for oxygen use | Hard, breathing loud | 8 to 12 minutes |
| RepetitionSharpens speed, form, and running economy | Sharpens speed, form, and running economy | Fast but relaxed | 1 to 2 minutes |
Hold times are what a trained runner could sustain in a single effort at that pace, not how long a session at it should last. Interval and repetition work is broken into reps.
Why one pace is not enough
Running is not a single physiological event. Easy running grows capillaries and mitochondria and teaches your body to burn fat, which raises your ceiling over months. Threshold running raises the intensity you can hold before lactate accumulates faster than you clear it. Short, hard intervals push your maximum oxygen uptake. Fast, relaxed reps improve how efficiently you move.
Run only in the middle and you get a diluted version of all of it: too hard to recover from properly, not hard enough to drive the adaptations that hard sessions exist for. This is the grey zone, and it is where most self-directed training quietly ends up.
The five paces, in practice
Easy. The one people get most wrong. Easy should feel genuinely easy: full sentences, no strain, a pace you could hold far longer than you are being asked to. It should make up the clear majority of your week.
Marathon pace. Steady and controlled, sustainable for a few hours. Its real value is rehearsal: it teaches you what goal effort feels like and lets you practise fuelling at the intensity you will actually race.
Threshold. Comfortably hard, roughly the effort you could hold for an hour if you had to. Tempo runs and cruise intervals live here. This is the pace most directly tied to race performance from 10K to the marathon.
Interval. Hard enough that you are breathing loudly and counting down the rep, run in bouts of a few minutes with recovery between. This targets VO2 max, and a little goes a long way.
Repetition. Short, fast, and relaxed, with generous recovery. Not about lung-busting effort but about turnover, form, and economy. Often the missing ingredient for runners who feel strong but flat.
How to find your paces
You do not need a lab. You need one honest recent race or hard time trial.
- Take a recent result. A 5K or 10K is ideal, and anything from a mile to a half marathon works.
- Convert it into equivalents at other distances with the race time predictor. This tells you what your current fitness is worth across the board.
- Turn a target into per-mile or per-kilometre numbers with the running pace calculator, which also gives you the splits to hold.
- Use the pace chart to see equivalent paces side by side and sanity-check what a given pace means over a full race.
The rough relationships: threshold pace sits a little slower than your current 10K race pace. Marathon pace is slower again. Easy pace is much slower than most runners expect, often a minute to ninety seconds per mile slower than marathon pace. Interval pace is around your current 5K race effort, and repetition pace is faster still, closer to a mile effort.
If your easy pace looks embarrassingly slow
It is supposed to. The number that feels too slow is usually the correct one. Easy running is not a lesser version of hard running, it is a different stimulus, and it only works if you actually run it easy.
Why easy days must be easy
The most consistent finding in endurance training research is that successful athletes across sports skew heavily easy: roughly 80 percent of training time at low intensity and 20 percent at threshold and above. The instinct to make every run moderately hard is exactly the pattern that produces plateaus.
There are two reasons this works. Easy volume drives aerobic adaptations that accumulate over months without costing much recovery. And keeping easy days genuinely easy is what makes hard days genuinely hard, because you arrive at them fresh enough to hit the paces that make them worth doing.
If you take one thing from this guide: the fastest way to improve for most runners is to slow down their easy runs, not to add more hard ones.
Pace and heart rate answer different questions
Pace tells you what you produced. Heart rate tells you what it cost. On a hilly course, in heat, or on a day when you have slept badly, the two diverge sharply, and that divergence is information rather than a problem.
Most well-built sessions prescribe one as the target and use the other as a check: hold the pace but back off if heart rate climbs beyond where it should, or hold the effort and let pace fall on the hills. For how to set the heart-rate side, see heart rate zones explained.
Your paces are not fixed
Training paces are a snapshot of current fitness, not a permanent property. As you get fitter, every one of them shifts, and training off numbers you calculated four months ago means training too easy on the hard days and, eventually, plateauing again.
Recalculate off a recent race or time trial every four to six weeks in a training block. If your race times have improved, your training paces should have moved with them.
The part paces cannot tell you
Knowing your five paces tells you how fast to run once you know what today's session is meant to do. It does not tell you which session today should be, how to sequence them into a block that peaks on race day, or what to do when you arrive at a threshold workout already tired.
That judgment, applied week after week, is most of what coaching is. It is also what Vaast automates: it works out your paces from your real training data, prescribes each session at the right one, and adjusts when your recovery says the plan and your body disagree.