How Many Minutes Per Mile Should I Be Aiming For?

Many of us don’t worry too much about minutes per mile when we’re first starting running – and rightly so. Initially, it’s much more important to focus on finding a pace that we can run at consistently, whatever that number looks like for us.

But if race training becomes part of our running journey, we’re likely to be faced with a training plan that encourages us to work out our different paces and how many minutes per mile that equates to. If you’re anything like us, all that math makes our head spin! Luckily, our resident running coach has broken it all down for us. Read on for our guide on how to work out your pace, and some common pace FAQs…

What on earth are ‘minutes per mile’?

Simply put, it’s the pace you run at. It’s literally an average of how many minutes it takes you to run one mile. It will vary depending on several things. This includes your current fitness, what race distance you’re training for and what type of training session you’re doing.

How many minutes per mile should I be aiming for?

There’s no single goal number – it’ll be different for everyone. But ideally, you should be running at different paces (minutes per mile or minutes per kilometre) in different types of runs each week, according to your goals and fitness.

A good place to start is a pace calculator. This is where you enter a recent run you’ve done, and the time, and the calculator will do some clever maths to work out your different paces. It’ll give you certain numbers of minutes per mile to aim for during your easy, tempo, and race pace runs. If you’re not sure what those terms mean, we explain them all in our training plan guide.

The important thing to remember when using a calculator is that it doesn’t know anything other than the numbers you’ve put in. If you’ve entered your time for a 10K, for example, its suggestions will likely be too fast if you’re now training for a marathon. To get around this, you can enter your goal time for an upcoming race, instead of a recent run you’ve done. And don’t forget that none of this is written in stone. If you’re finding your training plan too hard with the paces a calculator has given you, adjust them to suit you and your body.

Do I have to use minutes per mile in my training?

There are several other ways of measuring how fast or slow you should be running that don’t rely on minutes per mile. This is particularly useful if you recently started running or you’re returning from injury or a period of not running where your fitness will have changed.

You can use the Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) method where you simply give your effort level a rating from 1 (a light stroll) to 10 (all out effort). Heart rate training works in a similar way but you rely on your heart rate to tell you how hard you’re working.