An Ode to Training Logs…

When I ran track in college, I was religious about logging my workouts. I kept detailed notes in volume after volume of notebooks about how I felt. Highlighted days when I felt unusual pains. Celebrated when I had an amazing workout or set a new personal best. It was my diary.

A few years back, it crushed me when I dumped the moldy smelling notebooks in the recycling bin. Gone were my records of those glory days and all my personal bests. Gone were my split times to benchmark against. Gone was my history of injuries. And instead of notebooks, I started using Polar Personal Trainer — but have never been really happy with it. And when I started working with my coach, Kelly Liljeblad, and needed to let her know how I was doing with my workouts… Polar was a complete fail.

Last year, I was completely shocked when one of my favorite ITU triathletes, Kirsten Sweetland, (she was oh-so-close to making the Canadian 2008 Olympic Team) tweeted a picture of her training log — which she graciously allowed me to re-post.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”468" caption=”Courtesy of @K3Sport”]

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What shocked me about her picture? Well… here is one of the world’s best athletes. She travels around the world racing and training. She will (I have faith in you Kirsten!) one day race on the world’s biggest sporting stage — and probably even make a good living off of what most of us do for fun. And she was using the same type of training log I used over 15 years ago, and probably the same thing Roger Bannister was using in the 1950s. Wow! It was crazy to think about how she keeps such detailed notes, yet there was no easy way for her to look back and compare session notes or pinpoint events leading up to injuries — so old school! ;-)

But all of this also served as inspiration for us as we worked on what training logs would do in Trainsweet. We wanted to create — what we consider to be — the perfect training log. Perfect is something we’ll always keep working towards… but here’s a sneak peak at what’s coming.

• Secure. This is important, since it may be your diary as well — I wrote some pretty deep things after finishing up a 2.5 hour training run! You can provide coaches & trainers access — so there’s no more emailing spreadsheets or dropping off copies of handwritten pages. But you’re in control over what, if, and with whom you share.
• Attach today’s workout to your log. As you can see in Kirsten’s log, she was meticulous about recording what she did. Well… with Trainsweet, when you have a workout scheduled, we’ll allow you to do the same thing with a single button click.
• Make it fun. Not every workout is fun, but we think your training log should be. So we’ve included emoticons so you can visually display how you feel. To me, fun is also watching progression, so we’ve set it up to keep track of everything you ever do — your lifetime totals. Hmmmm…. I wonder who will be the first people to join our 100,000 mile running club, 500,000 meter swimming club, or perhaps 1,000,000 kilometer cycling club?
• And even though we have a lot of options to help you track whatever detail you want — you can record as little or much as you want. This is, after all, your training log.
• Searchable. To me, this is going to be a very sweet feature. We’re still working on this, but we’ll let you search everything by keywords, results, race names, workout names, route names, etc. How cool is it to search, then compare your Yasso 800s over the years, with a simple search?

And of course… you’ll never have to dump this into the trash!

We can’t wait for you to try it out yourselves… and it won’t be long now! Register, so we can let you know when Trainsweet, and the “perfect training log” is ready to try. And talk to us on our Facebook page about what you would want to see in the perfect training log.

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