Marathon Pace Chart

A 4:00 marathon is 5:41 per kilometre, 9:09 per mile. A 3:30 is 4:59 and 8:01. Every other goal time sits in the chart below with the pace it needs and the clock reading at 10K, halfway and 30K, and the calculator above rebuilds the full band around any time you type, in either unit.

Marathon pace chart: common goal times

Find your finish time on the left. The two pace columns are the average you hold from the gun to the line. The split columns are what your watch should read as you pass each marker if you run dead even.

The full chart further down runs in five-minute steps and shows the same rows in miles, with 5 mile, 10 mile and 20 mile markers instead. Type a time between two rows and the widget highlights the nearest one while the headline pace comes from the exact time you entered.

How to read it

Pace is finish time divided by 42.195. That is all a marathon pace chart is. What makes it useful is the split columns, because nobody does division at 30 km with a heart rate of 170, and a chart that says "you should see 2:50:38 here" saves you from trying.

The marathon has one trap the shorter races do not. Your goal pace feels absurdly easy for the first 10K. Fresh legs, a crowd, adrenaline. Almost everyone who blows up ran the first 10K 10 to 20 seconds per km faster than the chart said and felt fine doing it. The chart cannot stop you. It can tell you, at the 10K mat, that you are 90 seconds up and about to pay for it.

Even splits are a model, not a plan

Every row above assumes you hold the same pace for 42 km. Real runners do not. In big-city marathon fields most finishers run the second half slower than the first, and the further back in the field, the bigger the fade. A 4:00 goal that goes out at 1:55 and comes home in 2:05 is an 8 percent positive split, and that is an ordinary day for a first-timer, not a disaster.

The pattern inside that fade is consistent. Pace holds through halfway, drifts a few seconds per km from 25 to 30, then falls apart between 32 and 38 km when glycogen runs low and the quads stop absorbing the landing. The last two kilometres often come back a little, on adrenaline and the finish line.

A sensible plan for the marathon is a small negative split, 1 to 2 percent. For a 4:00 goal that means going through halfway around 2:01:12 and running the second half in 1:58:48, which is 5:45 per km out and 5:38 per km back. It feels like giving time away. It is not. Most marathon world records in the last fifteen years were run with the second half within a minute of the first, and the personal bests at every level of the field look the same. Build that version with the pace band calculator, which takes a swing percentage and prints the clock at every marker.

What a negative split is not: a licence to bank nothing and then sprint. If halfway arrives more than 3 percent behind schedule, the goal is gone and the plan becomes running a strong, even second half instead.

Hills, heat and wind move the number

The chart assumes a flat course at about 10 to 15 °C with no wind. Change any of those and the pace next to your goal time is no longer the pace you should run.

Heat is the big one for a marathon because you are out there long enough for it to accumulate. Above roughly 15 °C finish times rise for most of the field, and the slower the runner the more it costs, because the exposure is longer. The environmental pace calculator adjusts a goal pace for temperature, humidity and dew point so you start at a time you can finish.

Hills cost more on the way up than they return on the way down, and a course with 300 m of climbing is not a flat marathon plus a few slow kilometres. Run it by grade adjusted pace and let the raw number float. Wind works the same way: a headwind takes more than a tailwind gives back, so an out-and-back into the wind first is slower overall than the chart, not neutral. Treadmill long runs at chart pace need the belt at 1 percent; the treadmill pace calculator converts.

Picking a goal time you can hold

The chart answers "what pace does this time need". It cannot tell you whether you own that time. Two checks before you commit. Feed a recent half marathon into the race time predictor and see what it projects; if the projection is faster than your goal you have margin, and if it is slower, the chart row you want belongs to a fitter runner. Then look up your VDOT from the same race and compare the marathon pace it prescribes with the row you picked. If the two disagree by more than 10 seconds per km, trust the race, not the hope.

The half marathon is the honest predictor here, more than a recent marathon. A marathon time carries heat, fuelling errors and a bad taper. A half carries fitness.

How Movement Rebels fits

A chart is a static table. Your race is not. If you connect Garmin Connect or Apple Health, the coach in Movement Rebels reads the activities as they land, with pace, cadence and per-kilometre splits, so after your 32 km long run it can see that you held goal pace to 26 km and drifted 15 seconds per km after that, and it can say so in the debrief.

The coach plans the marathon block in your calendar, long runs with goal-pace inserts included, and when auto push is on those planned sessions land on your Garmin watch as structured workouts, so the pace targets from this chart are on your wrist before you leave the house. It cannot read a chart for you or run the race. It can tell you, week after week, whether the row you picked matches the runner in the data.

Race-day fuelling is the other half of holding chart pace past 30 km. Read How to Fuel a Marathon before you decide on a row.

Other pace charts

Same layout, different distance: the half marathon pace chart, the 10K pace chart and the 5K pace chart. The pace chart hub shows one pace against all four distances on a single table, and the age grade calculator tells you what your finish time is worth against the world standard for your age.

Marathon pace chart: finish time to pace and splits

Find your goal time in the left column and read across. Pace is per kilometre, the rest are the clock readings at each marker on even pacing.

Marathon distance 42.195 km. Rows step by 5 minutes.

The same chart in miles

Same finish times, splits at mile markers.

Questions

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