How to pace a Good For Age marathon attempt

Most marathons give you room to have an off day. A Good For Age attempt does not. You are not chasing a nice round number or a shiny new PB; you are chasing a specific time that either counts or it doesn’t, and if you cross the line ninety seconds on the wrong side of your age-group standard, a year of training simply doesn’t qualify.

That pressure does something strange to sensible runners. It makes them go out too fast, because getting ahead of the target early feels safe. It is the single most reliable way to miss it. In this article, I look at how to pace a Good For Age marathon attempt.

I’ve coached a lot of runners through Good For Age attempts, and I’ve run more than a few marathons of my own where the time mattered a great deal. So let me tell you how to actually pace one of these. In short: don’t bank time, run the first half slightly within yourself, build a sensible buffer below the standard rather than aiming right at it, and hold an even effort while the course and your own adrenaline try to talk you out of it. The rest of this article is how you do that in practice.

I’m Mike Gratton. I won the London Marathon in 1983, and I’ve spent the years since coaching everyday runners toward the times they didn’t quite believe they could run. Pacing is where more of those attempts are won and lost than anywhere else.

Aim for the buffer, not the standard

Here is the first mistake, and it happens before the race even starts. Runners train to the exact Good For Age standard, turn up on the day aiming for precisely that time, and leave themselves no room for anything to go wrong. And on marathon day, something almost always goes wrong. A warm morning, a crowded first mile, a headwind on an exposed stretch, a queue for the water station. None of these are disasters on their own. Added together, with no cushion, they’re the difference between qualifying and not.

So don’t aim at the standard. Aim comfortably underneath it. If your age-group standard is, say, three hours fifteen, I’d want you training and racing for something with a genuine margin below that, not a time that only works if the day is perfect. There are two reasons. The first is simple insurance against the ordinary chaos of race day. The second is more important, and it’s specific to Good For Age: for the big races, hitting the published standard doesn’t guarantee you a place at all. When entries are allocated fastest-first, the standard is the door, not the ticket, and the real cut-off can land well under it. I’ve written about what time you actually need in our piece What are the new London Marathon Good For Age qualifying times for 2026?, and I’d read that before you settle on your number.

The one pacing mistake that ends most Good For Age attempts

If I could fix only one thing about how club runners race, it would be this: stop banking time in the first half. You cannot put minutes in the bank early and draw them out later. The marathon doesn’t work that way. Every second you run faster than your goal pace in the first ten miles is borrowed at a punishing rate of interest, and the bill arrives, without fail, after mile twenty.

The physiology is unforgiving. Go out too fast, and you burn through your limited glycogen stores sooner; you tip into a higher intensity that you can’t sustain, and you arrive at the closing miles with nothing left to give exactly when the qualification is decided. I have watched countless runners who were dead on target at halfway lose two, three, four minutes over the final 10k, not because they weren’t fit enough, but because they spent that fitness in the first hour when it felt easy.

And in a Good For Age attempt, the temptation is worse than usual, precisely because the target is fixed. Getting ahead of the standard early feels like taking control, like buying yourself security. It’s the opposite. You’re mortgaging the part of the race where the standard is actually met or missed.

Even splits or negative splits for a Good For Age time?

You’ll hear a lot about negative splits, running the second half faster than the first. It’s become received wisdom, and for the elite runners at the front it makes sense, because they’ve got pacemakers to sit behind and a real race over the final 10k. For the rest of us, I’ve never chased a negative split as such. What I’ve always aimed for, in my own racing and in the runners I coach, is even effort from start to finish.

Even effort and even pace aren’t quite the same thing, and the difference matters. On a flat course in still air, even effort produces roughly even splits. On a real course, with hills and wind and your own accumulating fatigue, holding even effort means the pace flexes a little: you ease slightly on the climbs and let it run on the descents, and you accept that holding the same pace late in the race will take more out of you than it did early on. Run it that way, and you’ll often find your two halves come out close to even, sometimes with the second a touch quicker, which is the negative split everyone talks about arriving as a by-product of good pacing rather than as the goal itself.

When I won bronze at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, my two halves were roughly sixty-five and a half, then sixty-six and a half minutes. Slightly slower on paper for the back half, but that second half was the tougher part of the course, and the effort was even throughout. That’s the model. Not a heroic surge, not banking time early, just honest, even effort that you can defend all the way to the line.

If you want the theory of negative splitting in full, we’ve covered it separately in this article, Ask the Coach: Should I use a negative split strategy in my races? But for a Good For Age attempt, even effort is the instruction I’d have you take to the start line.

How to hold your pace when the course fights back

Knowing your pace and holding it are two different skills, and the second is the hard one. Here’s what actually pulls runners off their number on the day, and what to do about each.

The start is too crowded and too fast. In a big race you’ll be swept along by the field and the adrenaline, and your first mile will either be jammed and slow or suspiciously quick. Don’t panic at a slow one and don’t chase back time you think you’ve lost, and don’t get pulled into a fast one just because everyone around you has. Settle into your effort and let the pace come to you over the first couple of miles.

The hills. Run the climbs on effort, not on pace. If you try to hold your exact goal pace up a hill, you’ll spike your effort and pay for it later; ease back a touch going up, and let gravity give you a little of it back on the way down. Over the whole course it evens out.

The GPS lies. In a crowded city race, among tall buildings, your watch will tell you things that aren’t true, especially early on. This is why I want you to know your goal pace by feel, rehearsed so often in training that your legs recognise it. Effort and, if you use it, heart rate are your steadier guides when the satellites get confused; our guide to heart rate training zones will help you anchor those.

The wall. If you’ve paced it right and fuelled properly, you blunt the worst of it. The late-race fade that ends most Good For Age attempts is usually a pacing and fuelling failure dressed up as a fitness problem. Get the first half right and take your carbohydrate on board early and often, and you give yourself a fighting chance of holding form when it counts.

What this means for your race plan

Let me turn all of that into something you can actually take to a start line.

Know your buffered target. Start from the fastest-first reality, not the published standard, and set a goal time with a genuine margin underneath it. That single number drives everything else.

Write your pace band and commit to it. Work out your goal pace per mile or kilometre, and know the split you should hit at halfway. In a Good For Age attempt, I’d rather see you a few seconds down on that split at halfway than a few seconds up.

Rehearse goal pace until it’s boring. The runners who hold pace on the day are the ones who’ve run so much of their training at goal effort that it’s automatic. If goal pace still feels like a guess in training, it’ll fall apart under race-day pressure.

Race on effort, check on the watch. Let feel lead and use the numbers to confirm, not the other way round, especially in the crowded early miles.

This is exactly the kind of race execution I build with the runners I coach one-to-one through our Run Your Best Race programme, because a Good For Age attempt rewards a plan built around your specific target, your specific course, and your specific weaknesses, not a generic pacing chart.

The disciplined first half that bought a sub-3

I’ll leave you with an example from close to home. My co-founder Stu Taylor ran his first marathon in Paris back in 2012, in three hours thirty-three, and went out too hard in plenty of races in the years that followed, as most of us do while we’re learning. When he finally broke three hours, running two fifty-nine at Goodwood in 2024 in his forties, the race wasn’t won with a brave early surge. It was won in the first half, held deliberately in check, with just enough left to hold form when it mattered. The discipline to run the early miles slower than his ego wanted was the thing that bought him the finish. That’s Good For Age pacing in a sentence.

Your next step

Before your next attempt, do one thing: work out your buffered Good For Age target pace, the one with a real margin under the standard, and then rehearse it in training until it feels utterly unremarkable. Pace that you’ve made boring in training is pace you can trust when the gun goes off, and everything in you wants to run faster.

And if you want that race planned properly around your target and your course, that’s precisely what my one-to-one coaching is for.

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