What are folks' favorite marathon race predictors?
Personally, I've found issues with most of the tech products that try to estimate them.
- Garmin watch. Total trash. It's usually 20+ min off for my marathon (it has other issues for the other distances). What's most frustrating about this one is that even if I race well below the time, the predictions don't nudge.
- Metathon.com Nowhere close to my marathon time. I spoke with the founder and learned he used a fairly simple formula which is okay at predicting times for slower runners but it doesn't really try to be accurate below 3 hrs.
- RunKaizen. Actually pretty accurate, but you have to pay.
- AI Endurace. Also pretty accurate, but also have to pay. I used this app for a while, and kinda found it to be unstable. But it's cool how they give you an estimate of your time today and how it's expected to change the closer you get to the race.
The crude, low-tech solution I've found is to run 4 x [3mi on + 1mi off] about 5 weeks before the race, and take the average of the ons as the marathon pace. It's been able to predict my times within 1-2 minutes the couple of times I've done it. I'm working on my own predictor from my strava data which seems fairly accurate too, but wanted to hear what other folks do and if a solution already exists.