PACER Test Audio: Free 20m Shuttle Practice Track

The track above is ours. We generated it from the published 20-meter shuttle run speed table, the one The Cooper Institute adapted the PACER from, so the beeps land in nearly the same places. Two things keep it from being exact: the PACER gives you nine seconds for the opening lap where this file gives you 8.47, and it has a 21st level that this file does not. It is also not the recording your PE teacher plays, and it does not contain the spoken introduction that recording is famous for.

If the official one is what you want, FitnessGram gives it away. Its PACER test page hosts the traditional recording alongside six remix tracks made with Hip Hop Public Health, all free to stream or download. That is the file a school should be using for an actual FitnessGram assessment, and it is the one to ask your teacher for.

Ours is a practice track. Put it on a phone, mark out a course, and run it on a Saturday so the real thing in gym class does not catch you cold.

The official recording opens with a narrated explanation of the rules. That narration belongs to The Cooper Institute, so we neither copied it nor wrote an imitation of it. Our file starts with a five-second countdown and goes. The remix tracks also have backing music behind them, and ours has none, which makes the beep easier to pick out over your own breathing near the end.

The scoring language differs too. FitnessGram counts laps, while our audio announces levels, because that is how the test is scored everywhere outside US schools. A lap and a length are the same 20 meters either way, and both tables put the same number of laps in every level up to level 20, so a lap total means the same thing on both.

The pace underneath is close but not the same. Ours runs the Léger table from 1988, starting at 8.5 km/h. The PACER opens slower, at 8.0 km/h, and rounds each level to somewhere between 60 and 66 seconds, so it takes a few seconds longer to reach any given lap. For practice that difference is nothing. For a stopwatch comparison against the official recording it is real, and worth knowing before you conclude one of the two files is broken.

Measure 20 meters properly. Pacing it out costs you a meter or two per length, and over a hundred laps that turns into a score you cannot compare to anything. A tape measure or a phone GPS on a flat field will do. Mark both ends with cones, shoes, water bottles, whatever you have.

Turn the volume up before you start, not after. A phone speaker carries about as far as you need for one person on a quiet field and nowhere near far enough for a group or a windy day. If you are running this with a team, put it through a Bluetooth speaker at the halfway point of the course so nobody is sprinting away from the sound.

Reach the line before the beep, touch it with a foot, and turn. If you arrive late, keep going and try to catch back up on the next lap. Miss the line twice in a row and you are done. Your score is the last lap you completed on time.

Counting your own laps while your heart rate is above 180 is harder than it sounds. Most people lose count somewhere in the teens. The in-browser test fixes that. It plays the same beeps and keeps the lap and level count on screen, so you finish with a number instead of a guess. For the rules, the scoring and what the test is actually measuring, the PACER test guide has the longer version.

People search for 15-meter PACER audio because FitnessGram publishes a 15-meter option for gyms that cannot fit a 20-meter course. The 15-meter file on this page is not that. Ours uses the UK police Job-Related Fitness Test timing, which starts at 7.8 km/h instead of 8.5 and stops at level 5, shuttle 4. The slower start changes the shuttle counts under it, so a score from one does not transfer to the other.

So if your PE class runs the 15-meter PACER, use the 20-meter track above for general practice and get the 15-meter file from your teacher. If you landed here for the UK police test, the 15m bleep test page has the full chart behind that recording.