Get the app
Conditioning

10km time trial

Ten kilometres is where the aerobic base is the whole story. There is no way to bluff it with fitness borrowed from a hard fortnight.

Short answer

At 10km the aerobic base is the whole story — there is no way to bluff it with a hard fortnight. Between 43:00 and 50:00 is a solid engine; under 38:00 is well-trained.

The most common error in a 10km build is running the easy days too hard, which quietly turns every day into a medium day.

What it measures

The point of the test

Aerobic endurance over 35–60 minutes.

Why it is in the Train Smart battery: The benchmark your program is built around.

Protocol

How to run it

Flat course, fresh legs, no hard session in the 48 hours before. Even pace from the gun.

What you need
A flat measured 10km · A watch
Benchmarks

What is a good score?

The honest answer is that the score that matters is your own previous one. But you want a number to sit against, so here is one — with its limits stated.

10km — indicative times
TimeRoughly indicates
Over 60:00Building the base.
50:00 – 60:00A developing recreational runner.
43:00 – 50:00A solid engine.
38:00 – 43:00Strong.
Under 38:00Well-trained distance running.
Read this before you use the table. Indicative bands, not norms. Scores vary enormously with age, playing level, sex, surface, footwear, timing method and how recently you have trained the quality. Use them to see roughly where you sit, then compare every future score against your own previous one.
Getting it right

What people get wrong

Most of the variation between two tests is protocol, not fitness. These are the faults that make one score incomparable to the last.

Under-fuelling.
At this duration, going out on an empty tank changes the result. Eat properly beforehand.
Testing on a hard week.
A 10km on tired legs measures your week, not your fitness.
Improving it

How to actually move the number

Volume, mostly easy, plus one threshold session and one quality session a week. The single most common error in a 10km build is running the easy days too hard, which quietly turns every day into a medium day and stops all of them working.

Train Smart has a plan for this exact test. Choose the “10km run” goal, enter your current result, your target and your timeframe, and the app calculates this week’s working pace and builds three different sessions around it — retesting every four weeks. How conditioning plans work.
Keep reading

Related tests and guides

The testing battery

Five sport-matched numbers, re-run every eight weeks, that re-price your program.

Open

All fitness tests

Protocols and benchmarks for every test in the battery.

Open

Conditioning plans

Goal-driven running with a working pace recalculated every week.

Open

Know your number. Now train for it.

Train Smart re-tests you every eight weeks on your sport’s own battery — and the results re-price your training weights and reset your conditioning paces automatically.

Get Train Smart How testing works

One month free, then A$24.99/month. Cancel any time. iPhone and iPad.