Estimate your VO₂max from a recent race time using the Daniels & Gilbert method.
Estimate your VO₂max from a race time (Daniels & Gilbert).
Estimate your VO₂max from your 5K, 10K, half or full marathon time.
Daniels & Gilbert (VDOT) formula. Works best for maximal efforts of 5 to 90 minutes.
VO2 max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body can consume per minute, expressed relative to body weight in millilitres per kilogram per minute. It is the most widely used single marker of aerobic capacity.
A high VO2 max means your body delivers and uses oxygen efficiently under load. It improves with training, declines with age, and is partly genetic. It is not the whole story of performance: running economy and lactate threshold matter just as much on race day.
Instead of measuring oxygen uptake directly in a lab, Jack Daniels and Jimmy Gilbert mapped a relationship between race performance and the corresponding VO2 max. The output is VDOT, a single number that blends aerobic capacity with running economy.
The estimate is at its best when the reference effort lasted between 5 and 90 minutes and was run all out. A recent 5K or 10K gives the sharpest numbers. A comfortable long run is not a valid input.
These ranges help you place yourself, but they are not targets in themselves. They vary considerably with age and sex.
The most effective sessions are high-intensity intervals, typically three to five minute repetitions around 3K race pace with recovery between them. They should stay a small share of your week: without a large base of easy aerobic running underneath, you will not recover and progress stalls. One to two hard sessions per week is the ceiling for most runners.
Watches estimate VO2 max from the relationship between pace and heart rate. It is dependable as a trend, less so as an absolute number. A noisy wrist heart rate reading, hills or wind will all skew it. What matters is the direction of travel over several weeks, not the value on any single day.
Yes. The Cooper test asks you to cover as much ground as possible in twelve minutes, and VO2 max is estimated as (distance in metres − 504.9) ÷ 44.73. The six-minute half-Cooper is less punishing but slightly less accurate. Estimating from a race time, as this calculator does, spares you the dedicated test altogether.
No, but they are directly linked. vVO2 max, sometimes called velocity at VO2 max or maximal aerobic speed, is the slowest speed at which you reach your VO2 max, expressed in km/h or mph. VO2 max itself is an oxygen consumption in ml/kg/min. As a rule of thumb, VO2 max is roughly 3.5 times the maximal aerobic speed in km/h. The speed is easier to train with, because it is already a pace.