Log Those Runs

To know if you are making progress towards your goal, you need to monitor what you are doing. Monitor is the 2^nd M in the DREAMS Cycle ™.

The purpose of monitoring is to know if you are on the right track and getting closer to your goal. It will help to determine what needs to be adjusted if you have difficulty reaching your dreams. You can also use it to celebrate small wins. Tracking their workouts is something most runners do. When you monitor your progress, you can track more than just your training. You can obviously track your races and race time. You can also track the actions you do, a bit like checking off items on your TO DO list. Tracking your training can take many forms.

The original tracking mechanism was most likely a calendar. When I started running, I used some simple lined-paper that I inserted in a three-hole binder. I then moved on to a compact log book. Obviously, both are quite passé, but they still work admirably. My spouse still captures her training in a paper copy of Plan on Running Your best, a running manual I pulled together many years ago which contains a running log section. I have a few copies left at home from an earlier printing run. You can also simply print a page from the running log section.

With the advent of computers and spreadsheets, for a while, I created my own templates. You can find a variety of templates on the web by googling “running log template”. For a couple of years, I bought a downloadable program, the Runner’s Studio, which worked quite well but does not seem to be available anymore. Today, there are multiple platforms where you can keep track of your running. For those with the right running technology, the tool will capture your running automatically, be it your iPhone, or GPS watch. These watch manufacturers, e.g. Garmin, TomTom, and Polar, have their own activity log that you can find online. The one I use with my Garmin watch is Garmin Connect. A popular platform these days is Strava where you can share your workouts and running routes.

Today most people are using a GPS watch to capture their time and distance. I used a Garmin 610 when I was getting ready to attempt my Boston Qualifier. My spouse bought it for me on our anniversary about eight years ago. The issue in the old days before GPS was estimating the distances you ran. Often your distances were based on your known pace and time. Sometimes you chose a course that was measured by others.

Today, the issue with the GPS is the error. This can be as high as 3%. For a 10 km distance, this represents 300m. Over the course of a marathon, we are talking of over one kilometer off. This is what happened to me during the 2012 Toronto Marathon. By the end of the marathon, my Garmin GPS watch was at 43 km. In another race, the Road for the Toad 50 K in Paris, Ontario, the course had so many twists and turns that by the finish, it was telling me that I was at 48.7 km, again more than 1 km off.

One glitch that I encountered with my otherwise trustee Garmin, was that at one point, after months of not downloading the data to the Garmin Connect, I could no longer access or download the data. I attempted everything I could think of, but in the end, I had to reset the watch and lost three months of data, from October 2018 to February 2019. The lesson I learned was to download regularly, every week if possible. You should also back up your data from any system that you use, lest it gets deleted.

Below is the data I was able to recover from my Garmin Connect account for the month of March leading to my spring marathon goal race of the Ottawa Race Weekend.

Date	Distance (KM)	Time (hh:mm:ss)	Avg Pace (min/km)
February 28, 2019	10	0:58:44	5:52
March 2, 2019	10	1:03:12	6:19
March 3, 2019	25	2:11:00	5:14
March 5, 2019	5	0:33:25	6:41
March 6, 2019	8	0:50:10	6:16
March 7, 2019	12	1:10:30	5:53
March 10, 2019	10	0:59:55	6:00
March 11, 2019	8	0:50:20	6:17
March 13, 2019	12	1:12:30	6:03
March 14, 2019	10	1:00:00	6:00
March 17, 2019	35	3:17:26	5:38
March 20, 2019	12	1:09:14	5:46
March 22, 2019	8	0:47:22	5:55
March 23, 2019	7.49	0:50:41	6:46
March 24, 2019	25.62	2:37:37	6:09
March 26, 2019	10	0:59:31	5:57
March 27, 2019	12	1:12:19	6:02
March 28, 2019	5	0:32:17	6:27
March 30, 2019	7.33	0:47:52	6:32
March 31, 2019	15	1:29:41	5:59

By looking at the month of March, which was two months before the race, I can see that by having done a 35 km run, I should not have too much difficulty with the marathon distance. Having done only one run above 25 km, however, might be a problem as it is not what my plan prescribed (see the previous post on my action plan). I should have done two runs of 30 km and above. I also see that the fastest pace was a 5:14 for a 25 km run. Quite acceptable, but there was only one of those in March. One can wonder if I am running fast enough in my runs.

As you can see, by keeping track of your training, you can compare your activities to your action plan and adjust accordingly. So no matter what tool you use, go ahead and track those runs.