Tracking My Training

I’ve recently been looking over some of my old training data and racing to results to get a feel for what worked well last season and what didn’t.  And, so far, I’m find the information incredibly useful.  I thought it might be a fun idea to share a little bit about how I track my training/racing.

TrainingPeaks.com

TrainingPeaks.com is an awesome resource for tracking training and metric data.  One that I’ve been using for a long time in conjunction with

January 2011 Training

WKO+.  Essentially, TrainingPeaks.com allows you to both add planned workouts and then go back and input what you actually did.  This includes things like power/heart rate data, GPS, and your own personal description of the workout.  You could probably do this to track race data as well, but I’m not sure their system is quit robust enough as it stands.

From looking through my planned vs. actually training time I can see that when I was most “on my game” was when I had a plan through a coach.  You wouldn’t think that having a coach is really handy, especially with all of the free information online, but, at least for me, it made a world of a difference.

Racing Log

I became accustomed with keeping a training log after one of my team mates, Tim Sranski, wrote a blog article about the importance of one near the beginning of the season.  Since then, I’ve kept a pretty comprehensive race log with such mundane entries such as the weather, number of competitors, course type, etc all the way down to the important stuff such as how the races actually unfolded.

Not only has this information proved invaluable from a training perspective, but I think it will also come in handy when it comes time to do some of these same races again.  With 30+ races and many more actuall race days last year, it’s difficult to actually remember how everything went.  Being able to reflect on what happened last year prior to the current year’s race will provide me some insight as to how things might unfold this year.  There’s nothing like being one step ahead of the game!

The Conclusion

After reviewing and comparing data from these two sources I’ve come to two conslusions:

1) After a three weeks of V02Max work, I race like a champ.

2) My current strenght is flat, technical criterium courses and my biggest weakness are courses that feature short “power climbs” (those that take less than five minutes to top).

Now that I know some of my strengths and weaknesses as well as what kind of training works, I can go formulate a more precises training program with my coach as well as cherry pick some races that have features that suit my abilities!

How do you guys track your training and racing?  Any notable difference.  Comment below!