Keeping a training diary is a really important way of monitoring your training, tracking your improvements over time and offers great motivation when you need reminding of all great the running and training that you’ve done. It’s really useful to look over your training diary in the days leading up to a big race to give yourself a real confidence boost and to remind yourself that you can still run!
Ron Hill kept a training log for virtually his entire running life, he says "I started to keep a log on September 3, 1956. I was still at school and I wanted to keep a record of how many days a week I was running and how that affected my races. It was also a record of my race results. The things I added were weather conditions, the number of reps and type of speed work sessions and how I felt during and after the session. Nowadays, out of curiosity I record my resting heart rate when I wake up."
A training diary is also fantastic to make sure you aren’t dong too much training, by looking at weekly totals you can check that you aren’t increasing your weekly totals by too much.
Keeping a training dairy doesn’t have to be expensive, you can use a notebook and write down totals, or computer software such as Microsoft Excel. We recommend using a Garmin GPS device to monitor your speed, distance and heart rate monitor and these devices give you access to Garmin Connect, a free online software where your workouts are stored and can be analyzed.
You training diary needs to contain the following information
Date
Distance
Duration
Route
Heart Rate
How the run felt
You may want to also add in data such as mood, weather/temperature and the food/drink you have taken on board.
Once you have kept a dairy for a few months, or even years, you can start to review what you did leading up to races that went well and try to repeat it, similarly any time that you have a bad run or experience, you can look over your training and see what went wrong.
The reason why we’re so fond of Garmin Connect is that your run information is automatically uploaded to the website. You can then give the workouts a title and add in any notes from your run. You get to look at detailed analysis of your run, check out your heart rate data and make sure your effort levels are not too high.
If you are interested in purchasing a Garmin, please send us an email and we will be happy to help you find the perfect model for you.