moving to an old school pen and paper running journal - best examples?

DeeksQuarters wrote:

Thanks @star, yeah I think the act of reflecting on the effort and the conditions etc. is one of the strengths of going for a more traditional journal approach. I guess in theory you can write all that stuff in a Strava description, but I think something gets lost in that (and I'm probably likely to be less honest given others will read it on Strava!)

Actually that reminds me ... I also have a couple of Word documents.

One is my daily Injury Niggles log. I make a note of what ached/creaked when I got up and update if it anything occurs during runs or other part of the day. Useful to see when injuries start if you have to get professional advice. But also interesting to note how many things just go and you forget about. It's literally "May 22nd - Left glute sore, right plantar tight but not painful". No judgement or major analysis, simply a quick record.

My other doc is a typed diary of how the day's run went. All the stuff you'd write into a journal.

That said, I've kept written diaries on and off since 1992 so this is all part of my nature to express myself (as per this post!)

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Looking back I moved my running log from paper to computer around year 2000. Partly because I was training in gym in lunch hour so could type details into a spreadsheet at work when back at my desk.

Was overjoyed a couple of years ago when I had to resinsulate my loft and found my written running log (an A4 pad) from 1996 - 1999. No detail on the route but I could figure them out. It was literally just a Date, run duration (hours/minutes, not seconds) and an estimated distance. I kid you not that I drove one of my routes to find out long it was. Another I put a piece of string on the mapbook to measure it and convert to scale! Days before GPS and map plotting services. Kids of today would never understand what we went though ;-)

There was another mysterious page in the pad with a list of dates and a number beside each. Took me a while to realise this was my resting heart-rate in the morning. I'd read in a book that you find your baseline and any time you wake up and find heart-rate 10 beats above or below, it's a sign of illness or fatigue and to take that days run easier. Every morning I put the heart-rate monitor on and then laid still to get that record . Gave up after 2-3 months!

Amazes me how all my systems and recordings have evolved over time to meet a need (as well as reflecting more time focused on running as I got older and ditched other interests). I don't record my morning heart-rate any more but I will look at it while waiting for GPS to kick in and it clearly shows when my body is in recovery mode and when it's ready to run.

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As someone else said about Geocities ditching all their data. I used MapMyRun from 2008-10. The data is still there in some format. But the splits from my 2010 marathon are gone. I got a Garmin in 2012 and started uploading to their website - and again the general data is there but last time I looked back that far they seemed to have wiped out the maps of run. Don't trust 'em! It's the same with race results, some of the chiptiming companies responsible for them five years ago have got rid of the results already. That's even worse when you can't even download your own copy which I do.

That said, Microsoft (or whoever) have a habit of updating Word/Excel with new versions. I can still access my old 2003 spreadsheets but some of the formulas don't work. There's probably open source software one could use. The one big advantage to logging in a spreadsheet is you can copy and paste details to avoid reinputting and you can get it to do totals for you automatically. But not disastrous to get a calculator if you're keeping a written one.

When I started running in 1985, I didn't keep a log at all, though I wish I did now, just to see how much I've run/biked/climbed/skied, etc. over the years. From the late '80s to early 2000s, I just used paper pocket calendar, either one month per page (which I liked better) or one week at a time. My entries were minimal. Usually just the miles, nothing else. I'd occasionally have a minimal description of where I ran, especially if it was interesting, like a run in Yosemite. If I ran a hard workout, which wasn't frequent, I'd write the details. I also used it as a journal at times, scribbling in things about my life in tiny printing.

From the early 2000s to 2010, I mostly didn't log anything at all, maybe because I didn't bother to look for pocket calendars. I'd write on wall calendars only interesting events, and have kept some of those.

Since 2010, I've been using attackpoint.org, a free orienteering community-based log. The advantage of attackpoint is that you can quickly export your entire log to an Excel file. I export it maybe once per year as a backup, and to make it easier to search. You can track shoe mileage and injuries. It calculates GAP for your runs (if you enter elevation gain... just a simple formula that adjusts for uphills only, but matches up very closely to Strava GAP). Viewing by week is the usual, but you also have calendar view. If you have friends on it, you can can comment on their entries. IYou have have your log public or private or just visible to logged-in users. For a $25 yearly donation, you can upload GPS tracks and get some other features, something that I've done some years, but am not doing currently. I'm also on Strava for the community, and sometimes segments, but my main log is on attackpoint. Attackpoint has the advantages of a spreadsheet, but makes things easier to view and analyze.

Another excel (well Google Sheets actually) user here, and do pretty much same as this. As long as you keep backups I think this is the way to go. Much more convenient and means its with you where ever you are.

I use an engineering notebook - easier to write graphs and tables.

Every day has a page with a header: total time, milage, pace, elevation and if a workout, what the main set was. Then a one sentence description of how it went, sometimes as short as "utter $H!T"

Under that goes a table of split time/elevation or workout splits.

Then i'll also track food and nutrition under to keep an idea of what im consuming. On the back page, I have a table with weekly total milage and training time for the past year.

I’m not into publishing my runs or over analyzing my workouts but I’m not quite pen and paper either. I have simple journal style app (Momento) I use cause I would forget to grab a physical notebook but find it easy to log right after a run on my phone.

Miles

What shoes - to track for replacement

What the workout was

How I felt/anything else that feels significant That day

I found that just the act of writing my workouts down and being able to look back over progress helped my personal motivation since I do all my running solo. This system allows me to look back over my training if I feel the need but keeps me from bogging myself down with useless details.

HITHEREYOU wrote:

Another excel (well Google Sheets actually) user here, and do pretty much same as this. As long as you keep backups I think this is the way to go. Much more convenient and means its with you where ever you are.

At one time I tried using Sheets to run my 64 bit Excel spreadsheet but there were many macros that just wouldn't run on Sheets and I didn't feel like debugging them. I've been developing my log spreadsheet for many years and I guess I'm committed to MS now.

The database of my individual runs has over 7000 lines, 20 fields per line. Takes about 4 to 5 seconds to import it and run all of the macros using a PC with I7-7700K processor. I've thought about building a new PC with something like a Ryzen 3900X or Threadripper just for grins to see how quick it would import and run the macros. I certainly don't 'need' to upgrade my PC but it would be fun. Excel is one of the few programs out there that can take advantage of multiple cores and threads.