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My training logging for IMUK

Like all triathletes and semi-serious fitness types, I like to record my sessions and for my recent IMUK I made a big effort to plan and record my sessions against my plan.  This is for me was doubly motivational

  • on a rainy morning, the fact that there's a big fat zero in the "actual" column might - just - get you out for the session
  • on the start line, you can only remember all the work you've done that got you to that point if you bothered to write it down

I am going to blog separately my overall approach to Ironman training (it's not going to cause a revolution in methods), but I wanted to document here how I recorded it, in case others find the level of detail and overall approach useful.

For planning and retrospective analysis, I created a spreadsheet with

  1. a main sheet for the whole training time (1 row per week, with single columns for targets for swim, bike and run for the week
  2. separate sheets for each 4 week "iteration" (next post will explain how these work) with daily targets and actuals.  You can pin these up on your kitchen noticeboard to keep your loved ones aware of the madness that awaits

The spreadsheet is great : flexible, easy to crunch the numbers etc : but what I worked out in advance was that unless I had an easy way to record each session, I'd probably forget.  And I wasn't going to take my laptop to the pool.

So, of course, the answer was an app which took very little time to update and was always available : so that's the phone.  I am an Android user, and after a bit of research the application I chose was Tri Hard from foofvalve.  As they say:

Key Features:
* Track your training progress
* Add/Edit training sessions via dashboard interface
* Graph training volume/distance over time
* Widget - set a countdown timer for your next event. View your weekly summary
* Swipe through your weekly training entries
* Export training data into CSV format
* View Grand Totals from all of your training sessions

It's a very simple application, allowing you to record basic details (time, distances, average HR) of sessions for Swim, Bike or Run,  and of course allowing multi-sport days.  I never used the CSV export, but as I was easily able to update the spreadsheet from the app once or twice a week, that didn't really matter.   Weekly totals on each week page are a great way to see how your efforts are building up, but on the negative side, I did find the graphical reporting less than useful, and the application didn't seem to handle cross-year boundaries very well. But, in summary,  it's a very simple app, which did all I needed it to do.
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