Ever wonder how fast you are running? Everyone does it. It’s natural, particularly once you have become fatigued enough to start to slow down. Here’s a quick and dirty way to get a gauge on your pace.
In order to calculate your pace, you need to know two things: time spent and distance covered. The idea here is to not do any heavy mental lifting, so we try to keep things simple. We’re always going to start by thinking about a 10 minute mile. So, to start all you have to do is move the decimal point of the distance covered one place to the right. For example, if you have covered 5 miles a 10 minute mile would require 50 minutes. 26.2 miles requires 262 minutes. Easy.
Now that we know how long it would take a ten minute miler to run some given distance, we can compare it to your elapsed time to cover the distance. For instance, if it took you 42 minutes to run 5 miles, you have 8 minutes “in hand” over the ten minute per mile pace. Easy.
Next, divide your minutes in hand by the distance, but don’t worry about any remainder to get your “per mile savings”. In our example, 8 divided by 5 is one and change.
Lastly subtract your per mile savings from 10. In our example, 10 minus 1 (and change) is (sub) nine. Hopefully that makes you happy!
When I’m doing a training run, I find it useful to know the minutes in hand relative to my expected pace. For instance, I might calculate my pace at 33, 44, 55, and 66 minutes for a medium distance long run. At each point I’ll have some number of minutes in hand and by keeping track of that number, I get a general idea of when I start to slow down. Hopefully, in a medium distance long run it doesn’t happen. 
It’s more interesting to know this when running 16 miles or longer. I consider the distance covered before slowing down to be a good indicator of running fitness.
For example, last weekend I ran a 17 mile long run. At roughly halfway, I had approximately three minutes advantage on a 8 minutes per mile pace. At the end of the run, my advantage was roughly four an a half minutes. As a result I knew I had continued to run under 8 flat, but had slowed roughly 10 seconds per mile in the second half. More importantly, around mile 15 or so, the advantage was roughly 5 minutes. That means that I gave back 30 seconds of my advantage in the last two miles, and that I had generally maintained the pace through mile 15 then slowed drastically. Running 7:45 or so through mile 15 is Good Stuff, having that turn into 8 flat all of a sudden is not so much of a good thing.
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