Practical guide 3 min read
How to plan your splits for any fitness race
Build any race from runs, stations and transitions, predict your finish time, and turn a goal time into a target for every leg.
One method for any race
Fitness races come in many shapes: runs between workout stations, a single long run followed by a circuit, a gym's own competition, or a simulation you set yourself in training. They all break down the same way: a list of legs, each a run or a station, with a transition between each one. Plan every leg and the finish time follows.
Open the Fitness Race Planner to build your race.
Step 1: build the race
Start from the example race, or choose Blank race and add legs in order:
- Add run for each run, with its distance in kilometres or miles.
- Add station for each workout. Name it, then enter the work as metres, reps or calories: 500 m of rowing, 30 burpees, 20 calories on a bike.
- Use the arrows to reorder legs, and × to remove one.
Then set a transition time. It's added between every pair of legs, so a race of 8 legs has 7 transitions.
Step 2: enter your times
Enter a base run pace and, if your legs slow down as the race goes on, a slow-down per run. For any run that's different (a hill, a longer lap), type a pace into that run directly.
Enter a time for each station. The planner shows each one as a pace in the unit that makes sense for it: time per 500 m on a rower, time per 100 m on a carry, reps per minute on burpees.
Step 3: read the results
The planner's example race is four 800 m runs, each followed by a station, with 20 second transitions. At 5:15 per km with a 3 second slow-down, the runs take 17:02, the stations 7:30 and the transitions 2:20, for a finish of 26:52.
The timeline shows every leg in order, coloured by type, so you can see at a glance how much of the race is running, station work and transitions. The splits table gives the clock time after each leg.
Step 4: set a goal
Switch to Plan a goal and type the time you want. The planner scales every leg by the same percentage until the race adds up to it, and lists the legs where the most time is. Tick Lock on anything you can't realistically change, and the other legs share the difference.
If the goal is slower than your prediction, the targets show how much room you have on each leg, which is useful for planning an easy race or a training day.
Racing as a pair
Choose Doubles if you race with a partner. The run pace becomes the pace you hold together, and each station gets a work split between partners, so you can see who does how much. See how to split the work in HYROX doubles for ideas that work in any doubles format.
Keep and share the plan
Your plan is saved in your browser. Copy link creates a link that opens exactly this plan, with nothing uploaded and no account. Copy splits gives a plain-text version to print or paste into notes.