A 100 mile pace chart your crew can use¶
A flat pace chart breaks on a mountain course, because miles 70 to 80 are not miles 10 to 20. Build the chart from the race's own aid stations and climbing, and give your crew the times, not the paces.
A pace is a number you hold. A time is a number someone else can plan around. The person driving to mile 62 does not need to know you are running 14:24 a mile. They need to know when to be standing at the table.
Everything below works for a hundred. It works the same way for a 50 miler, a 100K or a 200, with different numbers.
What pace do I need for a 24 hour 100 miler?¶
14:24 a mile. Twenty-four hours is 1,440 minutes, and 1,440 divided by 100 is 14.4 minutes, or 14 minutes 24 seconds.
Held evenly, with a 6:00 am start, the chart looks like this:
| Mile | Elapsed | Clock |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 2:24 | 8:24 am |
| 20 | 4:48 | 10:48 am |
| 30 | 7:12 | 1:12 pm |
| 40 | 9:36 | 3:36 pm |
| 50 | 12:00 | 6:00 pm |
| 60 | 14:24 | 8:24 pm |
| 70 | 16:48 | 10:48 pm |
| 80 | 19:12 | 1:12 am |
| 90 | 21:36 | 3:36 am |
| 100 | 24:00 | 6:00 am |
That is a start, and it is wrong in two ways you can already name.
The first is that it counts only the time you are moving. Say you stop at ten aid stations for five minutes each. That is 50 minutes standing still, and your moving pace has to make it up: 1,390 minutes over 100 miles is 13:54 a mile, not 14:24. The stops are part of the day, so they belong in the chart.
The second is the course. Even pace assumes every mile costs the same, and a mountain hundred does not work that way. You hike the climbs and make some of it back on the descents. The night slows your footing. Your stomach has a vote.
If you are aiming at a cutoff and not a clock, the cutoff math for Leadville shows the same method from the other direction.
How do I make a pace chart for my crew?¶
Start from a finish estimate, then turn it into clock times at the places your crew will be.
- Get a finish estimate. The race time predictor takes one recent race, a distance and a time, and gives predicted finishes from 5K to 100 miles. It is built from distance and time only, so it does not know your course's climbing. Treat the 100 mile line as a middle of a window, not a promise.
- Get the pace band. Under the table, pick 100 miles as your goal, add the course's elevation gain if you know it, and enter an email. NavRun sends a printable PDF with three columns: mile, target pace, cumulative time. Past the marathon it gives a row every five miles, with the last row at 100. It is even effort, and if you entered elevation, the PDF says so on the page: flat-course splits, expect to run slower on the climbs.
- Add the start time. The band gives elapsed time. Your crew lives on the clock. Add the gun time to each row and write it beside the cumulative column.
- Write the aid station miles down the side. Find them on the race's own site. The band has a row every five miles, so for a station at mile 62, read mile 60 and mile 65 and take the part in between.
- Give a window, not a minute. Write an early time and a late time for each station. Your crew arrives for the early one and stays for the late one.
That fifth step is the one that saves the night. Take the flat chart above. It has you at mile 50 at 6:00 pm. Say you come through an hour ahead, at 5:00 pm, because the first half of a hundred feels easy. Someone who arrived at 6:00 pm for a minute-exact chart missed you by an hour. A crew told "between 5:00 and 7:00" was standing there with a chair and a drink.
What goes in the crew's hands once they know when to be there is a separate job. Race notes for your ultra crew covers writing what you need at each station before you are too tired to say it.
How should my pace change through the night?¶
Slower than the band says, and you should write that down before the race.
The band is even effort. A hundred miles is not an even day. The common shape is a first half that goes faster than the second, and the dark half is the one that decides when you finish. In the dark you see only what the headlamp lights. You slow on rocky or rooty ground. Your stomach, which has been working for ten hours, may stop taking in what it took in at noon.
Two ways to handle that on paper:
- Make two columns. One is the even band. The other is the band with a slower second half, which is the one your crew uses after dark. Same stations, later times.
- Do not hold the pace in the climbs. Walking a steep climb on purpose is pacing, not giving up. The power hiking post goes into how, and the night running post covers lights and the low hours.
The pacing strategy post lays out the reasoning on even, negative and positive splits. That one is mostly marathon research. Treat what carries over to a hundred as a starting point and lean on your own long days.
If you are dizzy, confused, or cannot keep anything down, that is a conversation for the medical staff at the next aid station, not a chart.
How do I plan aid station arrival times?¶
Take the cumulative time at the station's mile, add the start time, add the stops you have already planned, and widen it into a window.
Here is mile 62 on the 14:24 band, with the same 6:00 am start:
- 62 miles at 14.4 minutes each is 892.8 minutes, or about 14:53 elapsed.
- Add the start. That is about 8:53 pm.
- Say you have spent 40 minutes at earlier stations. Push it to about 9:33 pm.
- Write the window as 9:00 to 10:15 pm, and the crew knows when to be there and when to start wondering.
Then check two things against the calendar. Is mile 62 in the dark? Sunrise and sunset for the race date are on any almanac site. If the station is in the dark, your crew needs lights, and you need to be told which layer is in the car. And is the station a place they can drive to? Some are hike-in only, and the race's crew guide will say so.
If you would rather skip the arithmetic, the pace band's cumulative column does most of it. The part it cannot do is your course. It does not know your station miles, how steep the climb into mile 45 is, or how long you sit in a chair. You and the course map fill that in.
Where the number stops being about you¶
A finish time looks like a goal, and for you it is. For the people meeting you, it is a schedule. The same 24 hour estimate that tells you how hard to push tells them whether they are making a long drive or have time to sleep for an hour in the car.
That is why the pace chart worth printing is the one in clock times, with a window around each. The race is the same distance for everyone. What changes is whether the person waiting for you has to guess.
Give them the time. Get the pace band at the race time predictor.