I passed the threshold of 100 hours of logged exercise for 2008 during the bike ride on Saturday afternoon. What does that mean? Well, nothing at all. Other useless stats I know about the last 5 months:
- I haven’t been on Cross country skis for 78 days.
- I am “twenty meters” short of logging 300 kms on my fixed gear bike since Christmas.
- I’ve ridden 953.65 kms on my bike since the handlebar swap, 650.32 of which has been outside on pavement.
- I’m embarrassed about how little I actual rode my rollers this past year, please don’t calculate how little that actually was. On a brighter note, I did pass all my classes as a result.
- Swimming accounts for only 2.66% of my time spent exercising in 2008!
All kinds of useless facts like that can be logged on the website I’ve been using to keep track of my training this season. I decided around November that I’d benefit from keeping track of these things. I sorted through about a half-dozen websites that do this for you before settling on which one I was going to use. It’s kinda like a marriage, once you commit to one you’ve gotta stick with it, even if it turns out to have a few flaws it’s way more work to go and start out with a new one. All the time investment in the system warrants continued commitment to it. So, just like choosing a wife (because I am very well experienced in that department – ha!) I auditioned a few for about a week and tested out all of their different features. I settled on using a website called Tri-Fuel which allows me to give my own “definitions” to a bunch of sports and then log things under each one. I decided that the top three characteristics I was looking for in a partner were: simplicity of use, flexibility and ability to extract statistics. I needed something that would allow me to fill out the “time” and “sport” of one workout and leave everything else blank if I didn’t know it because half the time I don’t really care that much about heart rates etc. I also needed something that would allow me to log fixed gear bicycling separately from freewheel cycling. That’s not a feature that is as universal as you might think unfortunately.
So, I’m using this website: www.trifuel.com/log/ to track stuff. If you’re looking for one, I would recommend using the tri-fuel training log to anyone who is interested in logging aerobic fitness, it would be brutal if you wanted to keep track of weights etc but it was never designed for that so it’s no surprise that it wouldn’t work well.