Your Training Journal

Hi Kevin!

We highly recommend utilizing this training journal if you would like personal coaching. Your journal entries will automatically e-mail your 3 coaches so that we can respond in a timely manner with tips, answers to your questions, or changes in your training calendar based on your communications in your journal. A training journal offers you the opportunity to examine previous training cycles. By doing this you can figure out a lot about your training and how your body responds to that training. Creating a training schedule that works for you is basically trial and error. By recording information about each training session in your training journal you can review it at a later date and determine how effective that workout was for you. You also may be able to determine if that particular workout was the cause of an injury that might have appeared weeks later. So you know that it is important to keep a training journal, but what exactly should you write in it? Here is a list of common things that you may decide to include in your journal.

1. Distance, Time, and Pace- This one may seem kind of obvious, but many people will only record the distance they ran. There are many reasons to record your time and pace. One reason is that it offers a boost of confidence when you look back years later and see how much you have improved. Another reason is that it can help you detect over-training. When you keep track of the mileage you run you can also learn how quickly you can add mileage and how high you can take your weekly mileage before you start having problems with injuries and over-training.

2. Weather- By including the weather conditions you may be able to determine if a workout went bad because of the weather. When you try to decide whether or not you reached your goals for the workout you need to take weather into consideration.

3. Feelings and Effort Level- You should record how you felt on each run. Did you feel great and every step felt effortless, or did the entire run seem like a death march? If you become injured then you can go back and examine your training journal. If you begin to see that you are writing that you felt tired and sore while running on a regular basis then you can probably determine that something about your training was not working as you had hoped. There are days that you feel great and there are days that you feel horrible, but you should not feel bad everyday. If that becomes the standard entry in your journal then you should know that you need to change something about your training. Some people have created a scale that they use to rate how they felt while running. This is basically your perceived effort level. "1" means that you felt like it was a walk in the park. This would be a run that might be slightly faster than a walking pace. "10" on the other hand is an all out effort. It can give you a boost in confidence when you look at your training and you see that a pace of 8 minutes per mile used to be rated at 7 when you first began running, but not it is regularly being rated as 5.

4. The Days Events- Recording the days events can be beneficial because it will tell you how much stress you were experiencing in your life away from running. Running stresses the body just like other stressful events in your life. When you are under a lot of pressure at work or school and you add the stress of training on top of that it may become more than your body can handle. As a result you may become sick or injured.

5. What You Ate- When you record what you eat each day you learn a lot about your body. Some people can run shortly after eating almost anything. Others cannot eat for several hours before they run without experiencing stomach problems. Still others can eat some foods, but not others. When you record what you ate in the running journal you can decide exactly what types of food will help you in your quest of running a PR.

6. Route- Recording the route you run helps you judge the success of one workout as compared to other workouts. If the workouts are on the same course then it is easy to decide if the workout was a success. If you run one workout on a hilly course then you should not become too worried about the fact that your time was much slower than a similar workout that was run on a flat course.

7. Training Partners- When you write down who you ran with then it becomes easier to determine the success of a training session as well. If you head out for a 10 mile run with someone at 7 minute pace, but then the next week you run with someone else, so this time you run at 9 minute pace. If you are looking back over your training journal later you may think that the 9 minute pace run was an indication of loss of fitness or of an injury until you see that you ran with a training partner who can not run 10 miles any faster than 9 minute pace or ran with a training partner who pushes you to do better.

8. Goals- Determine what you learned from the workout: what you did well and what you want to improve on. Then decide on a short term goal (daily, weekly), intermediate goal (monthly, quarterly), and long-term goal (BiAnnual, Annual). You can also include a "dream goal". It doesn't hurt to dream big!

As you can see, Kevin, the training journal is very important. The things above were just a few of the common things that many people include in their journal. There are countless other things that you can include. Your training journal is kept for your benefit, and you can include any piece of information that you think is important. To get started logging journal entries and to update your profile, email monica@teamapexrunningandwalking.com for further directions.

Feel free to contact us anytime via email or phone 949-3306!

Mike, Dave, & Monica
mike@teamapexrunningandwalking.com
dave@teamapexrunningandwalking.com
monica@teamapexrunningandwalking.com