Editorial Policy

Everything on Swim Pace Calculator is researched, written and maintained by one person: Ian Welkins, an independent web developer. There is no content team, no contributed articles and no sponsored content. No federation, brand or event organiser pays for placement, inclusion or a favourable figure — the site's numbers come from published sources, and this page sets out how they are chosen and checked.

Official and primary sources come first, and they are named on the page that uses them. For this site, that means the competition framework and course definitions of World Aquatics, the sport's international governing body; the course-conversion method published by USA Swimming and implemented in Hy-Tek's meet software, with the NCAA championship factors shown where the two systems differ; the stroke MET values from the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities for calorie estimates; the swim distances and cut-off times in IRONMAN's official athlete guides for race pacing; and the published research of Wakayoshi and colleagues behind the Critical Swim Speed method. The Methodology page lists every source and what it is used for.

Figures are never copied from another calculator site. Where published sources disagree — conversion systems are the honest example, since more than one is in legitimate use — the page says which system it applies, names the alternative, and explains the difference rather than quietly picking one. Where no official standard exists, as with recreational pace bands, the page labels the figures as illustrative coaching ranges instead of dressing them up as official.

Every calculator shows its formula on the page, in plain sight, next to the tool. Every worked example printed on a page is reproduced through the site's own code before publication, and that code is covered by automated tests built around the published examples and known reference values — so a change that broke a formula would fail the examples before the page shipped. Conversions are checked in both directions, examples are chosen to cover edge cases such as distance-changing events, and rounding follows the convention of the source method rather than whatever looks tidy.

A tool page on this site is never just a calculator with a paragraph under it. Every tool page carries its method section with the formula shown, worked examples you can reproduce by hand, reference tables where the subject has them, a set of genuinely asked questions with direct answers, and an honest statement of the tool's limitations — what it assumes, where its estimates stop being reliable, and what it cannot account for. If a page cannot meet that standard, it does not ship until it can.

Pages are reviewed when a source document changes, when a reader report exposes a discrepancy, and on a rolling check of the site's data; each page's review is dated. Readers can report an error on any figure through the report-an-error page. Reports are read by the author personally and checked against the named sources. When a report is right, the fix is made in the underlying data or code, every affected page's worked examples are re-verified, and the correction is recorded with its date — corrections are dated when they are made, never backdated to the page's original review.

AI tools are used as drafting and coding assistance in building this site. No formula, factor or figure is published on an AI tool's say-so: each is checked against the source named on its page before publication, as described on the about page. Responsibility for everything published here rests with the author.

This site may carry advertising in future. Advertising never influences the site's formulas, factors, tables or rankings: the numbers come from the published sources named above, and no advertiser sees a page before publication or has any say in what a calculator returns. If ads are enabled, the privacy policy will be updated the same day to describe them.

Last reviewed: 10 November 2026