Speed & Pace Calculator
With distance 13.1 miles, hours 1 hours, minutes 45 minutes, seconds 0 seconds, speed & pace comes to 7.49 mph — average speed. It is reached in 4 steps, the last of which is 13.1 / 1.75, and each one is printed on the page with its numbers filled in. The formula is the one published by NIST, not an approximation fitted to it.
Average speed and running pace from a distance and a time, in both imperial and metric.
Formula and sources checked · How we check
Distance 13.1 miles, Hours 1 hours, Minutes 45 minutes
7.49 mph
Average speed for the example below. Editing a field recomputes the calculator below; this figure holds the answer the page was loaded with.
It is written into the HTML rather than drawn by a script, so a search engine reading this page without running JavaScript still finds an answer.
- Average speed
13.1 / 1.757.486 mph- In kilometers per hour
7.4857143 * 1.6093412.047 km/h- Pace per mile
1.75 * 60 / 13.18.015 min/mile- Pace per kilometer
1.75 * 60 / (13.1 * 1.60934)4.98 min/km
Worked example
A half marathon in 1:45 is 7.49 mph, or 8:01 per mile — 4:59 per kilometer. Pace is the inverse of speed, so a 10% faster pace is not a 10% smaller number of minutes; it is 9.1% smaller.
How to work it out yourself
- 1.Enter the distance and the time it took, in hours, minutes and seconds. Everything else is derived from those two.
- 2.Speed and pace are reciprocals: speed is distance per hour, pace is minutes per unit of distance. Runners think in pace, cyclists in speed, and the same effort produces both.
- 3.Use pace to plan a race and speed to compare against a limit. An 8:00 mile and 7.5 mph are the same run described from opposite ends.
The formula
- Average speed
13.1 / 1.75 - In kilometers per hour
7.4857143 * 1.60934 - Pace per mile
1.75 * 60 / 13.1 - Pace per kilometer
1.75 * 60 / (13.1 * 1.60934)
Source: NIST — SI units and derived quantities, USA Track & Field — course measurement and standards
Questions people actually ask
- How do I read a decimal pace?
- The whole number is minutes and the decimal is a fraction of a minute, not seconds. A pace of 8.02 min/mile is 8 minutes 1 second — multiply the decimal by 60 rather than reading it directly.
- Why does pace feel harder to improve than speed?
- Because they are reciprocals. Going from 10:00 to 9:00 per mile is a 6 mph to 6.67 mph change — 11% faster. Each further minute off costs more speed than the last.
- What distances are the standard races?
- 5 km is 3.107 miles, 10 km is 6.214, a half marathon 13.109 and a marathon 26.219. Entering 13.1 rather than 13.109 shifts pace by about half a second per mile — irrelevant for training, not for a course record.
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