So I have been playing with the McMillan calculator a little bit this season and was using my 1/2 mary PR of 1:34:32 (on a hilly course) for numbers.
This weekend I crushed my 10K PR with a 36:58 (previous was over 40min) on a flat course. McMillan is now saying my projected 1/2 time would be a 1:22:XX and my Full would be sub-3hrs. Has anyone had success projecting from a 10K time to the half or full? Should I use these paces as I prep for Long Beach 1/2 in October?
I’ll be doing my first stand-alone marathon next spring so if the calculator is accurate I’d like to use it for pacing numbers.
I’ve taken calculators and crunched the PRs of elite athletes and found that they follow along pretty well to marathon. Where this falls apart for the average joe is about 10K to half marathon because the normal person is not equally well-trained at all distances. I ran far too few miles as a college runner, so my times fell apart immediately. My mile predicted times I did not hit for another 10 years because of lack of volume.
Soooooo, you will likely find that to use shorter distances for picking pacing for longer distances then you will need to be fairly conservative. Unless, of course, you are running 120 miles per week.
Chad
That time doesn’t mean you can run that fast off your current fitness, it means if you trained up to marathon volumes using those training paces, that is how fast you would go.
That was my concern. Right now I’m training for Silverman Full so i can’t run 70-80 miles a week but after Silverman I will be training solely for my marathon and will be putting in the bigger “runner” milegage.
Well yea, that I assumed. I KNOW I couldn’t run a full right now at anywhere near that pace. But I am planning on using these numbers to train for my marathon next spring so I was hoping these would lead me to this kind of marathon result.
I find them pretty accurate for me and my training buddies, with the exception of the marathon target. Remember, these estimates are assuming the same training time/effort for the longer distances. You can correlate 5K to 1/2 marys pretty well, but there is a huge leap from a 1/2 mary to 26.2.
Surprisingly good calculations up to 1/2M as said.
A lot of folks fall short on the marathon (in fact, the majority), mainly because they run insufficient mileage. I heard somewhere that this calc was meant for runners 70+mpw.
Of course, some do it in a lot less, but from what I’ve seen on various running forums, it’s a good idea to use the marathon estimate as the near upper limit of what you can run on race day, even if you’re doing 70+ mpw.
I got close with 85mpw, but still not quite there. (I did, however, proceed to crush all my PRs from HM to 5k shortly thereafter.)
was the 10k certified or are you otherwise confident of the distance? I ask because that time is much superior to your 1/2 mary time. You wouldn’t want to base your training paces off a “bad” time. If it really was 10k, I would say you can drop that 1/2 mary pr by 10 minutes easy.
Congrats on the 10k PR. How many miles are you currently running? Are you doing any tempo runs or steady state runs during the week? How long ago did you run the 1/2 Thon PR? A bit more information would help in addressing your training concerns and questions.
I find the mcmillan thing to be PERFECT for me for all distances from 10k onwards. I cant even touch the 5k speed it thinks i can run (but i have TERRIBLE top end speed i knew that). I find the triathlon version to be very accurate for run legs too.
I find his calculators to be extremely accurate up to HM. Not that I haven’t trained for the mary to the point where it should be accurate, I just think it’s a personal thing. I’ve seen many people on the other side of the stick where they can’t touch the predictions for the shorter races that their marathon times predict. Like has been mentioned above, once you get to the mary a lot more things like nutrition, efficiency, mileage, etc come into play. I like to use his calculators for goals and for the great training data they provide when planning tempo, interval and speed workouts.
i have found it pretty accurate for 1/2 M. I’m usually using my triathlon or duathlon times so I subtract about 5%, i.e. if I run a 20 minute 5K in a triathlon I enter 19 minutes as my estimated stand alone run. Even with these fuzzy numbers the McMillan Calculator has worked well.
Using my lifetime PRs for 5 and 10k the McMillan Running calculator is spot on. With my half marathon it shows I should have ran faster but on 25 mpw of training I’d expect it to be off.
That’s good to hear. I plan on hitting 70+mpw once I get in marathon training mode this winter but I still would be stoked with a marathon time like that, even if the best possible scenario.
I ran a 1:22:30 in may. I got all confident and tried going sub 3 in June. I ran a 4:06. Part of that was probably because i had a bad day. but the majority of it was the fact that I wasn’t in sub 3 hour shape. Of course I didnt do any runs over 15 miles, so that probably had something to do with it.
First, I believe the course was pretty accurate as they run the same course every year and have been for a while, but you never know.
Second, my 1/2 mary time is probably VERY soft! It was at San Dieguito (rather hilly course) in early February, coming off pure base running with NO speed work, and only about 20-25 mpw at most.
I mainly do tri’s so have never focused on run training and still am not. I’m only running about 25-30mpw right now. One of the runs is a 6-7mile run with a portion at tempo and another run is slightly faster than base pace with a set of drills inthe middle. I also have one long base run a week.
I’m primarily asking about these times b/c with no formal run specific training, if these numbers are accurate on the calculator, I’m excited to see what can happen when I start a single-sport focus.