If you don’t log your training you are missing out on a way to improve your performance.

Logging your miles or Km is very important for your body and your training. Unless you have photographic memory, you probably don’t remember what distance you ran, 2 weeks ago. Even if you remember, it is hard to remember the time you did when you ran (to the second).

A friend once told me, what you cannot measure, you cannot change, which is true in business, in health and other issues in life.

So your log should help you measure your workouts and change them for a better performance.

Once you have a good training log (like the one I hope to explain to you today), it will only take you 2 to 5 min to update it everyday.

A training log is also a great encouragement when you look back. Say you are just starting to ride. Your distance rides might be only 10 miles. In 4 – 6 months your distance rides might be 40-50 miles. You can look back and see how far you’ve come.

Online you can find some free sites to save your log, like Trifuel, Runners World,or Beginner Triathlete. I prefer to do it in Excel (or Google Docs).

So here are the instructions (I believe you can do this with even limited Excel knowledge):

Worksheets:

Determine how many sports and worksheets you will setup.

I have 7 worksheets as follows:

Sheet 1, PLAN:

The 1st worksheet has my plan. Here I wrote down my complete 4 – 6 month plan (at least what I intended to do).

Here is a screen capture:

(click on the image)

If there is one page I recommend that you could skip is this one, since setting up this page is more for planning not for logging. You might do your planning differently, and that’s fine.

What I did here is have on top the date the, the days of the week and the workouts for each day. I also wrote how many weeks are left for my big race of the year (at this point it was 21 weeks.)

So you can probably skip this worksheet.

Sheet 2, By Week:

You can probably find a better name for this sheet. What I have here is a big picture of my workout per week.

(click on the image)

Let me explain this sheet since for me it’s the best part of my log.

For this sheet I use some commands from Excel but are very simple (you can e-mail me if you need help, I would be more than glad to explain how to set them up).

So on line 1 and 2 I have my goals.

So my triathlon distances are, 40Km (bike), 10 Km (run), 1.5 km (swim). Total, 51.5Km. That information is in light yellow.

So what I record to see how I’m doing regarding my triathlon training is this:

On line 17 you’ll see the date (from Monday to Sunday), the week of the year, and then the accumulated time for my bike rides, the accumulated bike distances  for the week and so on for the 3 disciplines.

I have a formula that updates these times and distances from the other sheets, with the following formula:

=SUM(Bike!P85:P91)

If you see on line 17, the Bike distance is light yellow, meaning I exceeded my triathlon bike distance, but not my 1/2 Ironman distance.

This is done automatically with something called conditional formatting under the format menu in excel.

I have this setup for the Bike distance Column:

So if I ride less than 40 Km per week, the cell stays white. If I ride between 40 and 89.99, it changes to yellow (my triathlon goal) and the if I exceed 90 Km, it changes to light green (my 1/2 Ironman distance goal).

Same is done with all the distances and total distance (column R)

Then on column P, I add the total time, then I convert that to minutes. If I do less than 250 minutes (more than 4 hours) per week, it turns red. This is obviously a bad sign for me.

Then I split in the following columns the % of time devoted to each sport. (Swimming should be about 20% of my time per week, I am not doing that well in that field).

You can read part 2 here.