The Find Your Finish blog
Practical guides for choosing a race, training for your next distance, and planning race day, plus resources for organizers setting up their own event.
A qualifying time is a finish-time standard a race uses to control who can enter a category. Here's how that system generally works.
A certified course simply means the distance has been independently measured and verified. It matters more than most runners realise.
A split is simply your pace for one segment of a race. Reading your own splits after a race tells you far more than the finish time alone.
A full marathon is exactly double a half marathon on paper. In training, pacing and recovery, the gap is a lot wider than that.
A hilly course and a flat course of the same distance are not the same race. Here's how elevation gain actually changes your effort and finish time.
If your goal race has real elevation gain, training exclusively on flat ground leaves a gap. Here's what to adjust, and what stays the same.
A 15K is 15 kilometres, roughly halfway between a 10K and a half marathon, and it's a genuinely useful bridge distance if you know where it fits.
A cutoff time is the maximum time allowed to complete a race and still be recorded as an official finisher. Here's what actually happens if you're close to it.
An ultra marathon is any race longer than the standard 42.195 km marathon distance. Beyond that, the format varies a lot more than people expect.
Most recreational runners finish a half marathon somewhere between 1 hour 45 minutes and 3 hours. Here's how that breaks down by pace.
A 10K is 10 kilometres, or 6.2 miles. The more useful question is what that means for your finish time and how much training it actually takes.
A 10K and a half marathon aren't just different distances, they're different commitments. Here's how to pick between them honestly.