How to calculate pace from distance and time

The short answer

Divide the time it took by the distance covered. If a hike took 90 minutes and covered 6 kilometres, that is 90 ÷ 6 = 15 minutes per kilometre. In miles, the same hike at 3.7 miles gives 90 ÷ 3.7 ≈ 24.3 minutes per mile. The unit you divide by decides which pace you get, so the distance and the pace need to agree on kilometres or miles before you start.

Pace is time over distance, not the other way round

Speed and pace answer the same question from opposite directions. Speed is distance divided by time — how far in an hour — which suits something moving fast enough that the number stays a convenient size, like a bike ride measured in kilometres or miles per hour. Pace is time divided by distance — how long for one unit of distance — and it is the more natural way to talk about a walking speed, because "15 minutes per kilometre" reads more easily than "4 kilometres per hour" when what you actually want to know is how long the next 2 kilometres will take.

A worked example

Say a hike covered 8.4 kilometres in 2 hours 6 minutes of moving time. Converted to minutes, that is 126 minutes. Dividing: 126 ÷ 8.4 = 15 minutes per kilometre, exactly. A less tidy example: 5.3 kilometres in 1 hour 47 minutes, or 107 minutes. 107 ÷ 5.3 ≈ 20.2 minutes per kilometre — the ".2" is roughly 12 seconds, so that reads as about 20 minutes 12 seconds per kilometre once the decimal is converted back to seconds by multiplying it by 60.

The same hike in miles: 8.4 kilometres is about 5.2 miles, and 126 ÷ 5.2 ≈ 24.2 minutes per mile. Neither figure is more correct than the other — they are the same walk, described in two different units, and the only mistake to avoid is dividing a distance in kilometres by a pace target set in miles, or the reverse.

Which time to use: moving time or elapsed time

A hike usually has two honest time values: elapsed time, from the moment recording started to the moment it stopped, and moving time, with the stationary stretches — a break, a photo stop, lunch at the summit — taken back out. Dividing the same distance by each one gives two different paces, and both are correct answers to different questions. Elapsed time answers "how long did the whole outing take, door to door." Moving time answers "how fast was I actually walking while I was walking," which is usually the number people mean when they ask about pace.

Using elapsed time when moving time was intended makes pace look slower than the walking itself was — a long lunch stop can add several minutes per kilometre to the result without a single step getting slower. Neither number is wrong; they are just answers to different questions, and it is worth knowing which one is going into the calculation.

One average, covering ground that was not uniform

A pace calculated from total distance and total time is an average — it folds a steep climb, a level stretch and a downhill together into a single figure, the same way an average speed on a drive folds together the highway and the parking lot. That average is a genuinely useful summary of the whole hike, but it will not match how fast any one stretch of it felt, because the parts that were slower than the average and the parts that were faster than it have already been blended together by the time the division happens.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a route with GPS and works this arithmetic out for you, reporting distance, moving time and pace per kilometre or mile as the hike happens, so there is no need to do the division by hand afterwards. The app is free to download.