To know if you are
making progress towards your goal, you need to monitor what you are doing.
Monitor is the 2nd 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.
