How do I nail Femmi’s pace guide?

This is a question we hear often and one that can cause concern for athletes training with Femmi, but you don’t need to fret! All the paces we provide in Femmi are simply a guide. They’re an approximation of the paces most suitable for your current fitness to help you get the most out of your training, week to week and session to session.

It’s only really a problem if you’re consistently running faster than prescribed and feeling exhausted or not seeing progress. So let’s break it down further and help you better understand the paces in Femmi and how to nail your training.

How do we prescribe paces in Femmi?

To personalise your plan and prescribe appropriate paces, we ask a few key questions during setup. If you’re training for a race, we ask for your goal time. If you're not racing, we ask for a recent race time to base your plan on. From there, we use a pacing system built from thousands of women’s running times. It estimates your paces for a range of efforts from an all-out 1km, 3km, 5km, 10km, half marathon, marathon, to steady and easy pace.

These paces should get progressively slower in that order. Why? Because we know one of the most common mistakes women runners make is pushing too hard, too often, especially on easy days. Your easy pace should almost always be slower than every other pace. We give you a range for each pace because we know not every day feels the same. Some days you might be at the faster end, other days slower  and that’s totally okay and to be expected.

What about hitting my paces perfectly?

Hitting your paces spot-on is great but not always going to be the case. We’ve done a pretty good job of accurately predicting paces, but there will always be individual differences and variability. If you feel absolutely rubbish one day and even the slower end of the range feels hard, that’s totally fine. Always listen to your body over the program.

If you came to Coach Lyds or me and said, “Help, I feel so shit today and can’t hit my pace,” we’d say, “Queen, just take it easy, walk-run if you need to, and don’t look at your watch.” And honestly, if it’s really that bad, taking the day off might be the best thing you could do. How you feel always comes before pace.

Where it gets murky is when you feel good and push your easy pace all the time. That can hold back your progress. Your easy pace should feel unbelievably easy like you’re pulling back and cruising. You should be able to chat easily and not feel out of breath.

Use the intensity scale!

A good rule of thumb is to check the intensity level Femmi provides at the top of your run. After the run, ask yourself - Did that feel like the prescribed relative effort out of 10? If it felt much harder, you probably need to pull back.

Trust me when I say: slowing down to speed up works. Recently, I was pushing all my runs too hard and getting nowhere. I realised I wasn’t training sustainably or periodising my weeks around intensity and recovery. I pulled back my easy and steady paces to match Femmi’s guidelines and within four weeks, I felt incredible. I was running speed sessions faster than ever and finally seeing progress.

What about prescribed KM vs time?

Most Femmi workouts are time-based, but some speed sessions use distance intervals. If your pace is slightly faster or slower than the estimate we give, go off time, not distance.

For example, if your easy pace is 5:50–6:00 min/km and you have a 60min run, we’d estimate you’ll run about 10km. If you’re running faster or slower than that pace, just run to time. Once you hit the 60min mark, you’re done, regardless of the distance covered.

To finish...

Always tune into how you feel. Use Femmi’s paces and intensity scale as a guide, and run to time. Be patient with progress and be kind to yourself. The improvement will come.