Race Strategy Calculator
Build a phased race plan — conservative, optimal, or aggressive — from your fitness and goal distance
Enter a recent race result above to build your pacing strategy.
How it works
The calculator first establishes your current fitness as an aerobic fitness score — either read directly from your most recent uploaded activity (when signed in) or derived on the spot from a recent race result you enter manually. That score is used to compute your five Daniels training paces (Easy, Marathon, Threshold, Interval, Repetition), which are then mapped to the five pacing regimes: conservative, sub-optimal, optimal, sup-optimal, and aggressive.
Regime mapping shifts with distance. What counts as "optimal" depends on the race. For a marathon or half marathon, optimal pace is marathon pace — the effort your fitness says you can sustain for that distance. For a 10K, optimal is threshold pace. For a 5K or shorter, optimal is interval pace. This means the same regime label corresponds to a genuinely different physiological effort depending on what you're racing, and aggressive for a marathon (threshold pace) is only moderately hard relative to 5K effort.
Build a phase plan by assigning a regime to each portion of the race, then adjust the distance split between phases until the percentages total 100%. The projected finish time updates automatically. For context on what finish time to target before building a strategy, use the Race Time Predictor; for the underlying training paces, see the Training Pace Calculator.
Want these numbers from your own data?
Import your watch data and Runima tracks your fitness, fatigue and race readiness for free.