"Average running speed" has no single answer, because it depends heavily on distance, age and training history. A 5K pace and a marathon pace are different sports as far as your legs are concerned. Here is a realistic picture.
The short answer
For recreational runners, the typical range is 8 to 11 km/h (5 to 7 mph), which works out at roughly a 5:30 to 7:30 per kilometre pace. Most casual runners who are not training for anything specific sit near the middle of that band.
By race distance
Pace drops as distance rises. These are broad recreational averages, not elite figures:
- 5K : around 10 to 11 km/h (about 5:30–6:00 per km)
- 10K : around 9.5 to 10.5 km/h (about 5:45–6:20 per km)
- Half marathon : around 9 to 10 km/h (about 6:00–6:40 per km)
- Marathon : around 8 to 9.5 km/h (about 6:20–7:30 per km)
The gap between a runner's 5K pace and marathon pace is usually 15–20%. If those numbers are closer together for you, you likely have endurance in hand and could push the shorter distance harder.
By age
Speed tends to peak in the late twenties to early thirties and declines gradually after about 40 : typically in the order of 1% or so per year, though training blunts this considerably. Plenty of runners in their fifties outrun untrained twenty-year-olds, which tells you training matters more than the birth year.
Jogging vs running
The line is fuzzy, but the common convention puts jogging below about 9.5 km/h (6 mph) and running above it. Jogging is generally a conversational effort you could sustain while talking; running is not.
The distinction matters less than people think. What your body responds to is effort and consistency, not which label applies.
Pace vs speed
Runners think in pace : minutes per kilometre or mile. Everyone else thinks in speed. They are inverses of each other:
- 10 km/h = 6:00 per km = 9:39 per mile
- 12 km/h = 5:00 per km = 8:03 per mile
- 8 km/h = 7:30 per km = 12:04 per mile
We cover the conversion in more detail in pace vs speed for runners.
What actually moves your average
Three things dominate, and none of them is willpower on the day:
- Weekly volume. More consistent easy mileage raises the pace you can hold at a given effort. This is the boring answer and it is the one that works.
- Terrain and elevation. A hilly route can cost 30–60 seconds per kilometre against flat ground at identical effort. Comparing a hill run to a track run tells you nothing.
- Heat. Above roughly 20°C, pace degrades noticeably at the same heart rate. A slower summer average is not lost fitness.
Measuring your real speed
Treadmill readouts and phone estimates drift. GPS gives you the actual figure, and you do not need a watch for it : open the running speed checker before you set off and it tracks live speed, average speed, peak speed and distance for the session.
One caveat worth knowing: GPS struggles under heavy tree cover and between tall buildings, where it can overstate distance slightly. Open ground gives the cleanest reading.
The takeaway
Around 8–11 km/h is normal for recreational runners, falling as distance rises and varying with age, terrain and weather. Compare yourself against your own previous runs on the same route rather than against a national average : that is the only comparison that controls for the variables that matter.