Track and Pacing Tools

Here we provide you with a variety of pacing tools to help you set your goals and pick the appropriate pace for your track workouts.

The “Basic Pace Chart” lets you find split times for various paces – for example if you are to do a workout of 800m repeats at your 5K pace and your 5K goal pace is 20 minutes, lookup 0:20:00 in the 5000m column, then follow the row to the 800m column and see that your 800m goal pace is 3:12.

FYI: if you’re new to track you need to know the distances on the track.  1 Lap is 400 meters (written 400m) and is just a few feet short of a 1/4 of a mile.

So here are some common track distances:

400m 1 lap 0.25 miles
600m 1.5 laps 0.375 miles
800m 2 laps 0.5 miles
1000m 2.5 laps 0.625 miles
1200m 3 laps 0.75 miles
1600m 4 laps 1.0 mile
2000m 5 laps 1.25 miles

Indoors the tracks are usually non-standard.  We use Lexington HS for winter-indoor track.  It’s an odd distance per lap – just over 145m/lap, which is 11.08 laps to a mile.  (Here is a link to the distance on time conversions for the Lexington track.)

Lastly, if you’ve been doing track for a while, and you’d like to get a bit farther into numbers and customize some workouts.  Try these pages below.  They are based on 5K goal pace – and show conversions to other race distances and suggested goal pace for endurance, stamina, speed and sprint workouts.

17:00 17:30 18:00 18:30 19:00 19:30
20:00 20:30 21:00 21:30 22:00 22:30
23:00 23:30 24:00 24:30 25:00 25:30
26:00 26:30 27:00 27:30 28:00 28:30