What VDOT is
VDOT is one fitness score, worked out from a race time. The coach Jack Daniels and his colleague Jimmy Gilbert built it from two equations.
The first is the oxygen cost of running at a given speed. The second is how much of your maximum you can hold for a race of a given length.
Put a race in and you get a score. The score then gives a time for any distance and a pace for each session.
How to use the chart
Find your VDOT with the calculator above. Or find a recent race in its column and read the VDOT on the left.
Read across that row for what the same fitness is worth at other distances. The paces table below gives your training paces.
A race you ran hard in the last couple of months is the best input. A goal time is not.
It is an estimate
The equivalents assume you trained for each distance and raced in similar conditions. They are most reliable between neighbouring distances.
A 5K to a marathon is a big jump. Without the long runs, most people run the marathon slower than the chart says.
Heat, hills and wind all make real times slower too.
The five training paces
- Easy
- Most of your running, long runs included. It is a range, and slower is fine on a tired day.
- Marathon
- The marathon pace your VDOT predicts.
- Threshold (tempo)
- Comfortably hard, about the pace you could race for an hour. Tempo runs and cruise intervals.
- Interval
- Hard, about the effort you could hold for 10 to 12 minutes. Reps of 3 to 5 minutes.
- Repetition
- Short, fast reps of 200m to 400m, with full recovery between. Daniels sets it 6 seconds per 400m quicker than interval pace.
If your recent race is a 5K, use the training paces by 5K time page. It lists the same paces every 30 seconds of 5K time, with track laps.
Where the numbers come from
Everything here comes from the Daniels and Gilbert equations in Daniels' Running Formula. The same code sets the paces in every Run-R plan.
Nothing is copied from a table, but every pace has been checked against the book's tables: easy, threshold and interval land within 2 seconds per km of them, and repetition within 3, about the tables' own rounding.
Treat any single number as a good starting point, then adjust by feel.