Mileage was everything in those days with a few fartlek/strides sessions thrown in to get your speed work going for good measure but if I wasn't hitting my X miles per week, I was disappointed. I really wish I had kept those sheets of paper, they were the forerunner to the spreadsheet and online version I use now, but needed a whole lot more work. What I would have given back then for someone to invent spreadsheets - maybe he/she was a runner!
One of the major drawbacks to the manual log was the potential for inaccuracies. A great deal of rounding up occurred, although I always convinced myself I was being fair and reasonable when I was probably just making myself look/feel good. I always remember one of my older running colleagues telling me (on more than one occasion) that .."the easiest person to fool is yourself" and with running logs there was never a truer word said.
However, with the introduction of GPS tracking, all that guesswork and invention is a thing of the past, and there's an amazing array of different views of essentially the same data but with a different perspective. More importantly, the only thing you have to cough up for is the tracking device itself - a suitable GPS enabled watch or phone. All the websites I am aware of offer a free version as well as some enhanced features for a monthly fee. I use a Garmin watch which comes complete with a www.garminconnect.com account, but synchronize the activities with Strava.com and Fetcheveryone.com, the latter being completely free.
Fectcheveryone started life as a running site, but has expanded reasonably well to include cyclists, swimmers and triathletes. This seems to be visited by lots of different types of users, from joggers to Olympic racers and 5K Park Runners to ultra runners.
Strava has a cycling background (I think) but also incorporates running and swimming to a degree and is aimed at the more competitive loggers who register 'segments' where they can compare themselves to everyone else as well as providing good statistics on totals, targets etc. The premium version calculates 'suffer score' based on heart rate, age, weight, speed etc. just to see how much you can suffer compared to other ordinary mortals. Strava has the advantage of also having an iPhone and Android app that logs the run/ride and uploads accordingly without needing a GPS watch.
Because I can, I also automatically synchronize activities with Runkeeper, but only because I found a 3rd a party website that did it easily. I haven't logged onto Runkeeper for ages so don't know if it's improved or not but it was pretty basic stats when I used it as an app on my iPhone.
The other website of note is Trainingpeaks.com which was started by a couple coaches and former professional triathletes. This allows you to log absolutely everything about your training - the basic GPS data, meals (inc. calories, protein levels etc etc), feelings, weather etc. as well as providing a comprehensive planning tool for activities and meals. In my opinion, it's over the top for 99% of people, but given my recent iron distance training experience, it's not too over the top it just depends how much of your life the training takes over. In my case, quite a lot, but not completely.
Here's a quick overview of my training stats since 1st Jan when my official iron distance plan started.
Swim: 63.1 miles
Biked : 3173 miles
Run: 841 miles
Total time: 339hrs, that's just over 14 days continuous training.
It should have been more, having reduced the planned swim hours by 1 session per week and sometimes not even doing as much as the plan some days, so if anyone stuck to the plan in it's entirety that's an awful lot of training.
Anyway, the big day is on Sunday and I've gathered most of my gear together and packed the caravan. There's quite a bit to do on Saturday to get ready, and I need some time set aside to worry about what I have forgotten to bring/do.
I'm told to smile all the way round because Channel 4 are filming. I'm sure that one of those will be difficult towards the end of the day.
13hrs should be within 'easy' reach, so 12hrs is my stretch target. Reality will probably be somewhere in between.
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