Loading...

Stride Length and Cadence Calculator Take the Guesswork Out of Running Faster

Cadencesteps / min

Your average from Garmin, Coros, or a watch lap.

Stride length

Garmin reports this in meters.

Pacemin / mile

Minutes and seconds per mile.

Your pace 9:39 per mile
This is what 175 steps per minute sounds like

Lock in this rhythm with music built to match it.

Get the music

This is the only stride length and cadence calculator of its kind.

A traditional pace calculator takes your time and your distance and tells you the pace you already ran. Useful for looking backward. Useless for getting faster, because neither time nor distance is something you can train. Your speed comes from two variables, and you can train both:

cadence × stride length = speed

Running cadence is your leg turnover — how many steps you take in one minute of running.

Stride length is the distance you travel with one running step (heel-to-heel).

Pace is simply that speed expressed as minutes per mile. It’s the number on your watch, but it’s an outcome, not an input. Change your cadence or your stride and your pace changes with it.

Because those three are locked together, knowing any two gives you the third. Enter any two and the calculator solves for the third, then projects your finish times at 5K, 10K, half, and marathon.

If you use a Garmin or other run-tracking device, you should be able to see your average cadence and stride length from previous runs.

Find My Pace — from your cadence and stride length

See what your current mechanics are producing. Enter your average cadence and stride length, and you’ll get the pace that combination produces. Then change one and watch what happens. Five more steps per minute at the same stride length could cut three minutes off your half marathon time.

Find My Stride — for the pace you want to run

Enter your natural cadence and your goal pace, and the calculator returns the stride length that pace requires. Lengthening your stride isn’t something you can do overnight — it’s a strength adaptation — but it’s absolutely something you can train, with the right information.

Find My Cadence — the rhythm for your target pace

Enter your stride length at goal-race effort and your target pace, and the calculator returns the rhythm that pace asks for. That number is also your BPM: when you step to the beat, one step equals one beat. So the cadence you’re aiming for tells you exactly what tempo music to run to.

Subscribe

The cadence and stride experiments behind this calculator, in your inbox.