Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ironman UK 2012 - Friday evening and Saturday

During Friday afternoon I laid out all my kit in the hotel room, and bagged. Sad to say I even rehearsed the changes, just to make sure I had the right stuff in the right bags. Then I bagged up Red and Blue bags and put them to one site. Friday night was pretty grim – a tip to others : if you are planning to stay in the Holiday Inn, book very early and demand a room on the third / fourth floor or higher, because otherwise you'll lose even more sleep from the wedding parties (they can run two at a time) which occur, noisily, on the ground floor till 1 am. I managed a few dozes till the partying stopped around 1 am and then Saturday was set-up day : a first look at the lake, and T1 and T2. But first I went down to check out the Ironkids event in the town centre  This was basically a run event for 6 yro and up kids who had a blast running around the last km of the run route and under the Ironman Finish banner. Fun to see them and hear the parents and friends cheer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ironman UK 2012, one week on..

Driving back to Shepperton - mid Monday, school holidays - was pretty uneventful, except for a stop for food at Warwick services, where me and Olly met up with a few IMUK competitors “refuelling” in Burger King. Nice to bump into the couple who crossed the line together the previous evening, and a guy in a woolly hat who I'd chatted to in the hotel car park. We got back mid afternoon, and being the sort of guy who likes to get things squared away, I spent a relaxing our getting kit put away, my foul-smelling wetsuit rinsed, and over-ripe bananas consigned to recycling. Then a relaxing evening, before back to work Tuesday. My physical state over the next few days was quite interesting. I'd got some sunburn on my right shoulder (missed that bit in T2), and my quads were sore off and on over the next few days, but to my surprise, my feet were in excellent shape : no blistered or chaffing. Coming downstairs Tuesday morning was harder than it had been Monday, and I re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keep people on the wagon to make social software stick

Aside from the buzz and enthusiasm of social software deployments, there's sometimes a back-story.  I've been wondering about how well organsations deploying social software plan catch to on-boarded users before they fall back to old habits. Here's the scenario that I am thinking of. When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself).  So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list.  However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value. The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many: The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle The answer ...
Post a Comment
Read more