I agree on current fitness being king but don't agree on some of the methodology. Personally I wouldn't use an in-training time trial as an absolute time on which to base your paces as they rarely reflect your current race fitness (which is my preferred method and which will be quicker). Also, I'm happy using a 5k time to project other training paces because the point of doing this isn't to come up with a series of race practice workouts or target paces the objective is to establish a series of training zones - this is an important distinction. I'm not 100% clear whether Andrew and I are in disagreement because his penultimate paragraph seems unclear as to the its use as race predictor or training pace predictor. As a side note if you are in the region of 40 minutes for 10k and doing decent / challenging mileage I think the McMillan easy pace is too fast for a truly easy run.
I think we sort of agree on some things and disagree on others!! I think I may have made it a bit confusing because I didn't fully tease out what I meant Race Predictor v Pace Predictor.
The Race Predictor in my mind is inputting say 5k...and telling you what you could possibly do a half-marathon in. To me this serves little purpose. It doesn't tell you your possible training zones or workouts needed to achieve this. It is jumping from A (current race time) to C (Possible race time) without including B (the training zone times!!). The Pace Predictor, and I don't know of many other than MacMillans, inputs a current race time (A) and comes up with training paces accordingly (B). It has a function for doing the (A) to (C) , but as I said, and McMillan concurs, that is not the purpose of the calculator. It doesn't tell you what to do with those training zones once produced, which is why I believe people need to understand more of the science behind what they are doing on each workout and how to tailor these to your race distance e.g More tempo runs for the half and more steady state and longer runs for a full for example. To clarify therefore....I HATE RACE PREDICTORS and only use PACE/TRAINING PREDICTORS. On the point of current fitness, I do agree that there is indeed a Lag affect with training and that maybe I adjust too often. For me I want a psychological reassurance of where my fitness is at more often than many probably. So if I don't have a race I will go and do one over my local course that is used as one. I just know it boosts my confidence. But in the strictest sense this is a time trial not a race. I therefore place less emphasis on it needing to be a race in assessing current fitness. Obviously, I acknowledge that are some other variables to consider on the day itself that may distort this. I just see the distance as the distance. I am therefore curious as to how you assess current fitness during a training cycle and how often you do this? Do you readjust everytime you race...because for some this would be more often than my 10-14 days!!? I wouldn't want to leave it longer than a month or two because this could lead me not to be pushing myself hard enough because I am still operating in training zones that are too easy. | 
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Andrew Streit 2
