5K pace chart: finish time to required pace

5 km · 3.1069 mi

Target times and the pace they need

The 5K is the distance where pace changes fastest: everything is compressed, so a 15-second swing is a visible pace change, and a chart is more useful than a calculator for one simple reason — you can see the whole neighbourhood of your goal at once.

How to read the chart

Each row is a finish time. The two pace columns are the average pace that finish time requires:

• read down the rows to find your goal, then across to see the pace it needs;
• read across from a pace you know you can hold, then back to the finish time it produces;
• the 5K pace chart table is exact arithmetic, so 20:00 appears as 4:00 per kilometre, not 3:59.

Because everything is expressed as an average, the chart says nothing about how you distribute the effort. A 20:00 5K run as 3:55 then 4:05 is the same row in the table as 4:00 then 4:00.

Why the 5K is unforgiving

Two effects stack up over 5 kilometres:

• Fixed costs are a bigger share. The start costs you time you cannot recover by pacing cleverly, and over 5 km that couple of seconds is about 0.2% of the race rather than about 0.02% of a marathon.
• Small time changes are large pace changes. Shaving 15 seconds off a 20:00 5K means finding 3 seconds per kilometre — a 1.25% pace change. The same 15 seconds on a 3:30 marathon is 0.36 seconds per kilometre.

This is why 5K goals are usually stated in round finish times (sub-20) rather than round paces.

Target times

The table of target times below is the list of round goals people actually train for, from sub-15:00 down to sub-30:00. The boundary is inclusive — a 20:00.000 5K is inside sub-20:00, and one millisecond slower is not.

Reading the target table is the reverse direction of the main chart: it starts from a goal and gives the pace you would have to hold. If a target looks impossible, the honest reading is not "train harder" but "check whether your current 5K result is from a fast course or a good day" — see the race time predictor for how your recent results translate.

From 5K to longer races

A 5K result is the least reliable input for predicting longer races, because the 5K rewards speed you may not be able to carry for two hours. The predictor applies Riegel's formula anyway, but treat its half marathon number as an optimistic boundary rather than a plan: the formula's exponent is fitted to performances of comparable quality, and a 5K is usually run closer to your limit than a marathon is.

For the training intensities that sit around your 5K result, the VDOT calculator converts it into easy, marathon, threshold, interval and repetition paces.

Related charts

• Half marathon pace chart
• Marathon pace chart
• Pace calculator — any distance, any time
• Methodology — how the numbers are rounded

How much a small pace change is worth

At 5K the margins are small enough that they are easy to dismiss, so it is worth doing the multiplication once. Every second per kilometre is five seconds of finish time over this distance; five seconds per kilometre is twenty-five seconds. In other words the difference between 20:30 and 20:00 is not a different kind of runner — it is six seconds per kilometre, about the width of the rows on the chart above.

That cuts both ways. It means a target that looks far away may be a handful of seconds per kilometre of fitness away, and it means the same handful of seconds is easy to give away in the first kilometre of a race. Both are reasons to look at the chart in per-kilometre terms rather than in finish times.