I've
written about pacing before, which you can read here. And although pacing can be applied to other aspects of
training, I'm mainly relating to running.
The
thing about pacing, which is sometimes lost on people, is that it's a skill.
And like any other skill, you have to practice it. You have to practice running
slow, running fast, and everything in between. You have to learn that you can't
run like the road runner right out the gates when you have to cover a mile on
foot. You may see others do it, but it doesn't mean you can.
You're
always better to err on the side of caution and start off easier than you think
you should. When you have to run for more than 2 min, at a "hard"
effort level, you better start off slower than you should. If you're wondering
why "hard" is in quotations, it's because the pace you start with may
seem easy at first, but it doesn't take long for it to become unbearable.
To get a
sense of the kind of pace you need to practice for certain distances, check out
the below cheat sheet:
This cheat sheet is suited to when you run on a
treadmill, but you can still use it as a guide for running outdoors (if you
know the distances you run outdoors). What's nice about this cheat sheet is now
you know if you want to run X time for Y distance, you know what speed to set
the treadmill at, both in mph and km/h depending on what your treadmill setting
is on.
If you're using a track as a way to pace your running,
just take the min/mi time and divide that by 4. Then you'll know how fast to
run each lap, or 400m.
The following link is useful if you do most of your running on a
treadmill and use the incline feature often. It gives you equivalent efforts to
pacing depending on the incline you're using and the speed you're running on:
Use these charts as a guide to help you understand
pacing. Remember, practice pacing on your both your easy runs and your
intervals. On your easy runs, make sure it's easy. You should feel like you
could go another 30 min. And even though interval efforts are meant to be hard,
it doesn't mean you can't pace them. Make sure each interval is almost the
same, whether it's in time or distance. If you see large discrepancies between
each interval sets, then you haven't paced yourself well.
