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My SmartCoach training program is filled with this kind of weird expressions like ‘@11:58′ and ‘5mi@10:12′. Do they want me to run in 11:58 in the middle of the night? Finish your 5 mile run in 10 min 12 secs? Say what???

The Explanation

There’s an explanation on the bottom of the program saying 9mi @ 9:11 means Run 9 miles at 9:11 pace. OK, I was still confused what 9:11 pace means, but I think it means you need to run 1 mile in 9 minutes 11 seconds. That’s pretty accurately said, I should be a robot to have such a steady pace. Anyways, it’s good the program is filled with this expressions, I’ll know how fast I should run. SmartCoach is smart!

The Conversion

Back to me and my metric limitations. Since I understand kilometers better than miles, I needed to do some conversions. One mile equals 1,609344 kilometers, so 5mi@10:12 converts to 8km@6:20. Now it says that I need to run 8 kilometers with the speed of 1 kilometer in 6 minutes 20 seconds (roughly 9,5 km/h). This makes more sense to me and 10 km/h looks like a decent running speed.

The Life Of An Under-Equipped Engineer

There’s still a problem: how do I know how fast I’m running? There is equipment available for that purpose, but there’s no way I would get it by Tuesday, my first training day. The solution: I measure the length of my running routes and set time targets. I usually run the same routes, so I only need to make the measurements couple of times. I have a training log created in runnersworld.com and I used the routes section to measure the length of a route. It happened so nicely that one of my usual routes was 3,15 km (approx. 2 miles) long. I saved it to my routes list, so I can use it later e.g. when I change the running speed and need to set new time targets.

With all this information available (and a handy Excel sheet) I had a look of my first training: 2mi@11:58. First the conversion to 3,2km@7:26. Roughly this means the exercise will last for 24 minutes. Then I look at the route I saved to my runnersworld.com profile. The map has an excellent feature (Google kicks butt!), it shows the kilometer marks on top of the route. This way I can easily see that the first kilometer ends next to a bus stop, so that’s my first time target is to reach the bus stop in 7 min 30 secs (7,5 minutes is easier to remember than 7 min 26 secs). In next 7,5 min I need to reach a T-crossing and finally get home before the total exercise time, 24 min, is exceeded.

Ok, this was a lot of work just to set the running speed to the correct level, but I’m an engineer, I love this stuff

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