Here's how to use this to print out a pace sheet for your runners. For example,
say you have a cross country meet or a workout where you will
be timing at points along the course that are at odd distances. If you
convert those distances to decimal miles and enter them in the blue
boxes below the "Label Points" row the program will populate the
cells with times for your runners that will match the times beneath the
"Pace" column to the left.
The "Label Points" boxes are just places where you can label
what the distance is. You can leave them blank if
you want. Any time you enter something into the sheet recaluation will
happen when you leave the cell. The drop-down boxes for "Starting
Pace" and for "Increment in Seconds" let you tailor the
output for your particular situation. For example, if you choose a starting
pace of 5
minutes and an increment of 5 seconds, the left column will start with 5
minutes and increment every 5 seconds.
Try this... enter a distance of .5 mile in the first blue box, 1.5 in the
second, and 3.107 (which is the mile equivalent of 5k) in the 3rd.
Now set the increment to 5 seconds, the starting pace to 5.5 minutes, and
the "Dist in Mi." to 3.107 (5000 meters). These are the default
settings you can just hit the "reset" button at the bottom and
these values will be entered. The "Dist in Mi." entry isn't
mandatory but without
it you won't see the projected finish time for each pace. In fact changing
the Distance in Miles affects only the orange "Time" column so just
the Distance, Pace, and Increment can be used alone to produce finish times
at various paces.
Now, If one of your runners comes by the half-mile point in around 2:53 you
know he's running at 5:45 pace and if he averaged that speed for
the entire race he'd finish in 17:52. If he comes though the 1.5-mile point
in 9 minutes you know he's dropped to 6 minutes average pace. If,
at the finish, he's 18:23 you know he picked up the pace and averaged 5:55
for the race. If you want more resolution just adjust the starting
pace and increment accordingly. The drop-down box for the starting pace
lets you choose from 4 minutes to 10 minutes in 30 second steps. The
increment choices range from 1 to 15 seconds. So, with a few print-outs you
should be able to have a chart for even your slowest runners.
Since the program takes points along the course in miles only I added a
little conversion box in the upper right. Enter the Meters you want to
convert to get the mile split and use that for your point along the course
as shown below. In this version, you need to enter the miles
manually. I don't know if I'll later add an auto feature.
Since you have the option to start at 10 minutes per mile with an increment
of 15 seconds the times can go over an hour. If this happens
you'll see a line of dashes for all times of 60 minutes and over. This version is meant for shorter races,
not marathons. I'll probably make a
similar version that formats in hours minutes and seconds. I could do that
with this version but it doesn't look very good with all the leading
zeros.
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When I first made these tables a couple of years ago (2015) I
used them just for the purpose above. However eventually I realized that they
also make great training pace tables.
We have a 1000-meter grassy 1k course at Tidelands Park in Coronado CA
that’s 43 meters short. When
we run repeat 1000’s we add the extra 43 meters. But, other workouts we do
on the course are tempo, VO2max, and race-pace workouts that
require more than one lap. With these tables I can input the actual length
of the loop (957 meters) to get the length in miles (.5947),then
use multiples of that for the additional loops. Now instead of walking
around the course while all the different groups come by the check-off
point I can stay in one place. Say you have a runner who you want to run
around 18 minutes in an upcoming 5k race. Enter the lap distances as
shown below and finish with 5k. For a Race Pace workout, she would run
several laps at around 3:57 per lap which is 5:48 per mile pace.
If this were to be a VO2max workout you’d use her VO2max pace. Scott
Christensen recommends using the Astrand protocol which is an
exhaustive effort at 2 miles. If you don’t have a 2-mile time you could
convert the 5k time using one of the equivalent time conversions
on the web. According to the Jack Daniels Calculator 18:01 for 5k is
equivalent to 11:15 for 2 miles. Below I’ve entered 2 miles in the
distance box which shifts the time column to correspond to the loop
distances around the park…. Now I have both the race pace and VO2max
times for each loop.
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