Online training logs

02/15/2011

Online training logs

Every day I upload my training data to three different sites: Training Peaks, Garmin Connect and BuckeyeOutdoors.com. I'd love to just use one site, but I find that all three offer functionality I want.

Training Peaks is mandatory, as that's where I get my planned workouts from coach and upload my actual data. I could just use the free version, but of course Training Peaks only makes data analysis available to paid subscribers. I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay a paid subscriber as pretty much the only data I look at in Training Peaks are my "whoops" chart:

(as in: Whoops, sorry coach, I exceeded my HR zone x% of the time,) and my pace chart to see what % of my run I was below 9:00 min/mi while staying (mostly) within my HR zone:

I'm finding a lot of the rest of the whiz-bang charts are pretty worthless. Take this one, which compares my run pace to my fastest bike pace. Seriously, what genius came up with this?

After I upload to Training Peaks, I'm usually off to BuckeyOutdoors.com. I found this site last year and have used it to track all my training. I really like this site; it's super easy to use and it's free. One feature that keeps me coming back is the Challenges section. There's a tri challenge each year (how much can you swim, bike and run?) and the same people are on it this year as last. One big difference in the rankings from last year: Me! I was definitely towards the middle bottom of the pack last year, and this year I'm in 3rd place:

Barely. I'm competing with someone named J.R. Brock from Texas for 3rd. Right now I'm only 12 miles ahead. Next time I log on he'll have done a 40 mile ride and I'll drop down to 4th again. I have no idea who this person is, but it's turned into a little game. I'm totally jazzed for Paul in 1st place: he's doing IM NZ! We're looking forward to his race report.

The other thing I like about BuckeyeOutdoors.com is the ability to select any date range and pull up a report by sport. This is a much easier way to compare months or years. Training Peaks only has fixed ranges like "last 28 days" and doesn't break things out by sport.

Then of course there's Garmin Connect. One thing I like about this site is that the data shown actually matches what's in my Garmin (unlike Training Peaks, which is usually off on pace and also doesn't distinguish between "moving pace" vs. "average pace.") I also like that I can title my workouts by route, and then do a search for all workouts with that route in the title. That enables me to compare my progress on the same route at a glance:

And of course the Player is the coolest feature ever. I like to see where on a route my pace or HR picks up or drops off.

I'd love to use Garmin Connect instead of Buckeye, but unfortunately there's zero reporting capabilities.

So my wish list is that someday Training Peaks would get some clues on usability, functionality and reporting from some of these free sites. And in the meantime, I'll continue using three training sites.

What site do you use?

Posted at 10:12 PM in General Training | Permalink

Comments

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I bet the folks from Training Peaks would love to read this review! Seems like they're always trying to update to make things better... Good analysis!

Posted by: Mchelle | 02/15/2011 at 11:15 PM

Try SportTracks - Forerunner compatible!

Takes a little getting used to but it is free and partially open source so cleverer users than me write plug-ins for it, exanding the functionality inline with what people want/need. A good example is the elevation correction plug in - allowing you to correct the often spurious elevations logged on the 305/310XT (in my case), and overlay the corrected on the original etc.

You can plan courses to download to your watch, set goals to reach, track equipment usage (is that useful??). Routes are viewed in google maps and graphs/charts are decent and flexible.

I've tried garmin connect and training peaks (free version) and find sportracks best all round!

Though understandably you may not want to add site numero 4 to your to-do list after every workout!!

Ps after re-reading I should stress I dont work for sporttracks, I just get excited about stuff like this!

Posted by: David | 02/16/2011 at 08:13 AM

David, sporttracks looks very cool; alas, I'm on a Mac and it looks like they only develop software for PCs. You'll have to let me know if they ever release a Mac version.

Posted by: jennifer | 02/16/2011 at 08:22 AM