How to find your VDOT and use your training paces

VDOT turns one race result into a full set of training paces. This tutorial walks through finding yours and, more importantly, using it without overcooking your easy days.

Step 1: Pick your best recent race

Open the VDOT calculator and enter a race you ran hard in the last few weeks. A 5K or 10K works well. The effort matters more than the distance, so use a race where you genuinely emptied the tank, not a casual parkrun.

Step 2: Read your VDOT score

The calculator shows your VDOT as a single number. Higher is fitter. On its own it does not mean much, but it is the key that unlocks your paces, and it is a handy way to track fitness over a season. Watch it climb across a training block and you know the work is paying off.

Step 3: Learn your five paces

Below the score you get five training paces.

• Easy is for most of your running. It should feel genuinely comfortable, conversational, almost too slow.
• Marathon pace is your steady goal-race effort.
• Threshold is comfortably hard, the tempo zone you can hold for about an hour in a race.
• Interval pace is for hard reps of three to five minutes that build your engine.
• Repetition pace is fast and short, for sharpening speed and form.

Step 4: Switch units if you need to

Use the miles and kilometres toggle to see every pace in your preferred unit. The choice is remembered on your device.

Step 5: Run easy easy and hard hard

This is the part most runners get wrong. The gap between your easy pace and your threshold pace is bigger than it feels. If you run your easy days too fast, you arrive at your hard days tired, and the hard days are where fitness is actually built. Look at your easy number, trust it, and let those runs be slow.

Step 6: Recheck after a few weeks

As you get fitter, race again and recalculate. Your paces should drift faster. Chasing old paces after your fitness has moved on is a recipe for staleness, so keep the number current and let your training move with it.