Last week I was pondering over whether I was running my long runs too fast or that my target time was set a little bit on the light side. I couldn't make my mind up so I decided to plug my best race times for the half marathon and 10kms into the numerous marathon finish time predictors to see if that would give any indications. These predictors of course are an oversimplification to which I bring 2 extra limitations to.

(a)They are based on having the same level of training for the distance being predicted and the data race that it is based on. I clearly haven't the same condition when it comes to 26 miles as I would have for a half let alone 10kms. 10kms is an everyday run and a half marathon is run (plus a little bit more) every week in the form of the long run. I have yet to run a full marathon from start to finish.

(b) I haven't actually run that many races to base the predictions on. I have only really started racing since my school days after moving to Sweden. Living outside the major cities with only public transport to rely on my choice of races has been very short. I have therefore only raced one half marathon back in 2003 and 3 10km races. Two of these however were cross country style and rambling tree routes had to be avoided.

So there we go, the predictors have flaws and the data being feed into them isn't the best either, but its just a bit of fun. My Pbs are 1h44m55s for the half and 41m16 set last last for the 10km. I tried 6 different calculators and the results were pretty much the same from all of them. Based on my 10km time the results suggest if I was fully trained I could finished somewhere between 3:09.50 to 3:14.01 and my half marathon time suggests a finish between 3:40.41 to 3:43.20. The truth probably somewhere between the two. The results came out a tad faster than that I was expecting but I have been factoring in the unknown training levels over the Swedish winter which of course the predictors cannot take into account.

So that's whats possible all I have to do now is get out there and train. Thankfully the chickens were not counted to early last Thursday A new weekly total record was recorded Last week and my most run in a single week is now 49.5 miles. I plan to level out at this volume of training over the near future with the only real difference being a extension to the long run of about 1 or 2 kilometers every second week. Now if only this week was going so well...

update: I have added a page of links to the predictors I used in case you would like to do a similar excercise