How to predict your marathon time

When you are traininf or a marathon it will come in handy to have several different methods to predict your maratime, to plan your race pace and training. You will oinvest from 12 to 30 weeks for a proper marathon program and measurements, as with everything in life tied to performance, are the key to success. Here yome tips for you on how to predict your marathon time.

Yasso 800s

Runner's world magazine came up with this method to measure your current running performance and make predictions about your marathon time. The Yasso 800s will help you to determine your aerobic ability, but because there are recovery periods between and the workout is not as long as a propoer 30 to 35km and does not give you enough insight in how you respond to fatigue. Keep this in mind, when using Yasso 800s as a predictor for your marathon time and maybe add 5 minutes to the calculated overall.

How Yasso 800s work:

Pick your desired marathon time, for example 3:30 hours in my case.

Turn the hours into minutes and the minutes into seconds, for this example 3:30 minutes.

Run 10x 800 meters with 3:30 minutes rest in between,. If you manage to hold this time add 5 minutes and you have your marathon time prediction, for this example 3:35 minutes.

The recommendations I came across is to incorporate three of these somewhere in your marathon schedule to have some data to base your decisions on.

Galloway's magic mile

The Galloway magic mile is an even shorter approach than the Yasso 800s. You run one mile best effort as fast as you can. Once you are finished you multiply the result with 1.3 to get your Pace per mile for the marathon and calculate your result from there.

Fast finish long runs

A fast finish long run does what it says on the tin. You pick one of your scheduled long runs and perform the first 8 to 12 miles at a your normal long run pace. Over the last three to ten miles of the workout you begin to speed up and run faster and faster with the aim to finish as fast and string as you possibly can whilst still increasing the speed for the entire "faster and faster" period of the run (so don't turn this into an interval run).

This type of workout will be a good training for you and also build confidence that you can finish your marathon strong. While the Yasso 800s do not account for long term performance, these runs will be a good indicator hwether you can carry on in the marathon or not.

You can incorporate these workouts by alternating them into your scheduled long runs on a biweekly basis.

Long distance race

Another way of predicting your marathon time is to run a long distance race prior to the marathon in your preparation. Any race above 15km will work. If you are in Ireland, the Dublin race series might be a good choice for you.

Some runners say that you can predict your time for the marathon by taking your half marathon race time, double it and then add 5 - 7 minutes to it. If that was the case, my marathon time would be around 3:05 to 3:10 which is far off my real times of 3:58, 4:06, and 4:12 for the time being. So be careful whenever you calculate your performance rather than actually run it.

Jack Daniel's tables

if you do not want to do a test at all and just predict your time by looking at a piece of paper you can do this with the Jack Daniel's tables. These provide you witch predictions based on any race time you have produced and calculating from there to the corresponding marathon time. If you are interested in predictions like this you can find one of these tables here.

What you should watch out for

All of these methods are only indicators of your performance and will not actually yield the result you calculated. It will help you to plan your race and training and make according adjustments if you fall behind in your pace or amp up the training a bit if you feel like you are ahead of the curve.

They are not supplement for running the needed miles and doing your long runs, intervals and all the hard, prescribed work of your marathon program. If you do these workouts, get ahead of the curve and use that as an excuse to be lax with your training you are mixing a nice cocktail of doom for your marathon time