Our Methodology
Why even effort, not even pace
No marathon course is flat, and race day weather never cooperates. eveneffort plans for both, so mile 25 costs you what mile 1 did.
The problem with even splits
Most calculators divide your goal time by the distance and give you the same split for every mile. That only works on flat ground in perfect conditions, which is to say it never really works. Holding pace up a climb costs you far more energy than holding it on the flat, and the descent on the other side doesn’t pay all of it back. So an even split plan quietly asks you to overspend on every hill, and it has no idea what the forecast looks like on race morning. As far as we can tell, no other race pace calculator corrects for a course’s real elevation profile and the live weather at the same time. That’s the gap we built eveneffort to close.
How we build your paces
We hold effort steady instead of pace. It starts with the real elevation profile of your course, mapped from official course data, climb by climb and descent by descent. Published exercise physiology research tells us what each of those grades actually costs a runner in energy relative to flat ground, and that research was validated on real runners on real slopes. We use it to redistribute your goal time across the course. Paces ease a little on the way up and pick up a little on the way down, so the effort stays level even though the terrain doesn’t. Your goal finish time never changes. Only the way you spend it does.
Then we add the weather
Terrain is only half of it. Heat, humidity and wind all change what a given pace feels like, and none of them are settled until race week. When a forecast is available for your start time and location, we pull the hourly conditions for the hours you’ll be out there, including temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction, then layer their effect onto the elevation adjusted plan. A headwind on an exposed stretch, or heat building through the back half, gets worked into your splits the same way a hill does, instead of ambushing you at mile 18.
What you get
A pace chart built for the course and the conditions you’re actually going to run in, rather than an average that ignores both. Pace the effort, not the clock.