What is VDOT, and why runners keep talking about it

If you hang around runners long enough, someone will eventually mention their VDOT like it is a credit score. "I'm a 52 now." It sounds like jargon, and it kind of is, but the idea underneath is simple and genuinely useful.

The one-sentence version

VDOT is a number that sums up your current running fitness, worked out from a race result. Higher is fitter. That is it.

It came from Jack Daniels, the running coach, not the whiskey. He noticed that runners with similar race times responded well to similar training paces, regardless of which distance they raced. So he built a scoring system that maps a race performance to a fitness number, and that number back to a set of training paces.

Why it beats guessing your paces

Before I understood VDOT, my "easy" runs were too fast and my hard runs were not hard enough, which is the classic mistake. Everything blurred into a medium-effort mush that left me tired but not faster.

VDOT fixes that by giving you actual numbers for five kinds of running:

• Easy runs, for building your aerobic base and recovering. Most of your week.
• Marathon pace, your goal effort for the big day.
• Threshold runs, that comfortably-hard tempo feeling.
• Interval work, hard three to five minute reps that build your engine.
• Repetition work, short and fast for speed and economy.

The gap between your easy pace and your threshold pace is bigger than most people think. Seeing it written down stopped me from turning every run into a race.

How to find yours

Run a recent race, or a hard time trial, and feed it into the VDOT calculator. You will get your score and the full set of paces in miles or kilometres. Run the easy paces honestly easy, and save the effort for the days that ask for it.

A word of caution

Your VDOT from a 5K and your VDOT from a marathon will not always match, especially if your endurance and your speed are at different stages. That gap is information, not an error. A higher 5K VDOT than marathon VDOT usually means your speed is ahead of your endurance, so guess what your long runs need.

Treat VDOT as a coach in your pocket, not a verdict. It points you at the right paces. Showing up and running them is still on you.