Since 1988, I have used Excel to keep track of my training.  Initially it was just running and I would track how many miles I ran each date and the pace.  Later when I got into biking, the log expanded to track cycling, then later track the mileage on my bicycles and the various componets.  Over the years this Excel file became increasingly complicated.

Even after writing an article about online training logs, I still keep up my Excel spreadsheet.  For over a year I upload my GPS data to a couple of websites (Strava and Garmin Connect) and to a local computer based program (Ascent). One might think that a website like Strava.com should be more than enough, and might be for most people, for me personally I want to do more, including:

• Chart cycling and running miles separately
• Track how I am doing compared with prior years at this same time
• Track for both my wife and I together since mostly bike and run together
• Track details on mileage on various bike components on various bikes
• Track which club or non-club miles I cycle.

This manual entry was becoming a chore after all these years so I sought to automate the process.  I looked at the above and decided to scratch the last entry since no online training log let’s you record that.  I still wanted to track how I was doing against prior years, using my old training log data, so none of the online training logs are by themselves are sufficient.  I finally came up the approach to modify my current Excel file, which has sheets for all prior years, a sheet for my bike component log, and a lot of other training specific data.  But instead of adding a new sheet for 2012 with places for every single workout during the year, I added a sheet for 2012 with weekly totals.  A small section looks like this.

If you look across the actual Excel file you will see similar blocks for my running, as well as Anne’s running and biking.  I decided it was no longer necessary to record every workout in this Excel file, just the weekly totals.  That allows me to plot how I am doing compared with prior years.  Initially I was going to manually enter this data but found a much easier way.  Since I upload my GPS devices to Garmin Connect, I use the great report feature in that program to export to CVS files.

I just select the report type “Group by Week” for “This Year”.  After doing a one time customization of the report to get the columns I wanted,   I then select Cycling and export the CVS file.  I repeat for running.  Then repeat for Anne’s Garmin Connect information for both running and cycling.  This creates four CVS files.  In my main Excel file I use links to these external CVS files to fill in all the data.  It is not something I need to do very often, just when I want to see how I am doing.  Even if I do monthly, I will still get the data in a weekly total format.

Bike Component Wear

The only missing item is the mileage on each bicycle.  For that I end up doing some manual entry, here taking the data from Strava.com which allows you to track your rides by bicycle.  I just enter the current mileage on each bicycle and use that in my existing formulas on component wear.  Hopefully if Gramin Connect ever adds this feature I can automate that also.  I might just switch over and add all the components in Strava.com and only use that for component tracking.

How is My Training Going

Using this new approach, I can still easily see how my running and cycling are doing compared with prior years. This shows how I did in 2011 compared with the prior years.

Now for 2012,  I will still have similar graphs, but using the data that is auto filled in from the Garmin Connect CVS files.  I have friends who don’t even use a cyclometer to cycle with and have no idea how many miles they have ridden.  But I also notice these same guys are always having some issue with cassette wear because they didn’t change their chain until it was too late.  It might be the engineer in me that loves to see the data so I know how I am doing and how my bikes are doing.  Now I have an effortless way to get that data in a format I can use for my own purposes and not rely on the limitations of the online training logs.  For most people this is more than they will want and are happy to just use what one of the online training logs offer, but if you want to get things in a format you can manipulate for your own purposes, this might give you an idea.

Categories: Training Log
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We returned from a month stay at our Utah home and had a great time.  The cycling up there does not have the variety we have in California, but we enjoy riding with the Utah Velo club.  Not sure why, maybe because their riding is a fairly good match with our abilities.  The Utah Velo club Saturday ride have about 25 people and their is just enough regrouping so most everyone can get back together.  The ride leader is great and is very good at controlling the group.  Doing rides with less climbing than we do in California does make this all much more possible.

While I once did a lot of cycling with ACTC in California, that is not the case so much anymore as you can see from this chart.

Our time in Utah this year has been limited, but miles with that bike club has been almost as much as with ACTC.  When I am California I prefer to bike with my cycling friends, the Night Riders, which is a ad hoc group that just does what we want to do, when we want to do it.  ACTC, on the other hand, is a inflexible club, with it’s own way of doing things and rides that are schedule many weeks before they happen, when the weather conditions can not be known.  ACTC is a very diverse club with all types of riders and although it has a lot of rides, more than most any other club, I have little interest in most of them.  Some involve too far of a drive from our house.  Most have a pace that is too slow for us with too frequent and  long regroups.  Some rides seem more focused on getting to some place to eat than riding the bike.  Others are oriented to try to do the most number of different billy goats (climbs) rather than finding the most interesting route.  Others are geared to only ride a long distance and there is little group riding on those.  There is nothing wrong with any of these and they meet the needs of many.  It is just curious that with such a diverse group of rides that there are so few rides that interest me.

I have the great advantage of being able to bike with my wife, Anne, and sometimes my children.  Also I have some great cycling friends that are nearer my home.   Those meet most of what I want to do when I am in California.   I am glad that ACTC does exist and still do quite a few rides with them.  However my cycling with that particular club in on the wain.

Categories: Training Log
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This afternoon I headed out for a climb up Squaw Peak with the plan of doing some interval training during the climb. It has been about 2 weeks since I did intervals up this hill.  In the past I did an interval for 400 feet of climbing and then a recovery for 200 feet.  I decided to reduce the recovery to closer to 100 feet of climbing since I was stopping to take my blood pressure, which added to the recovery period.  This way I could get in a 3.5 intervals rather than just 3.

I feel with all the climbing I have done I should see a good improvement from July 18th.  After I analyzed all the data, I did get a small improvement, but not as much as I had thought I was going to achieve.  My vertical speed (measured in meters per hour) averaged a little more and my average heart rate during the intervals was a bit less so both of these factors were in the direction of an improvement.

After each interval I took my blood pressure, which showed even lower than last time.  To get the reading I used a wrist blood pressure monitor and came a complete stop before taking the reading, otherwise the monitor would show an error.  I am not quite sure if the blood pressure is accurate, but even if it is close, it does mean that I am not getting abnormally high blood pressures when I take my heart rate up high and on the contrary, my blood pressure is dropping.  I believe during the ramp-up, as with the stress test, my blood pressure does go up, but holding a high heart rate over a period of time, causes the blood pressure to drop. 

The temperature was not excessively high, but it was much more humid than I have experienced in Utah before (turns out the most humid on records) due to all the rain storms).  My jersey was totally soaked by the time I reached the summit, so I know I was pushing hard.    I just am not able to achieve the vertical climbing speeds that I was able to achieve 3 years ago.  Anne reminds me I am getting older.

After reaching back down to the highway, I headed up to climb South Fork.  My plan was take it easy for this since I was very tired from the hill intervals.  Just before I reached Vivian Park, some guy came buzzing by me on his bike, but he stopped at the park.  I went past him and started to climb up South Fork, taking it easy as I planned.  Soon he came up from behind me and seemed try to pass me at a faster speed than he could maintain.  Even with tired legs it was too much of a challenge to resist so I picked up the speed to match his, then as he slowed I started to close the gap, but kept behind him until we were half way up.  When we reached one of the sharper pitches I kicked in and went past him.  He started to dig deeper and increased his speed, but the failure to close the gap quickly showed me that he could not keep up.  The gap kept increasing, although I was taking my heart rate up to 170 bpm near the end, a bit higher than I took it during any of the intervals.  When I reached the end, I quickly stopped and took my blood pressure and had a reading of 101/71 with a pulse rate of 162.

Overall I think I got in a good workout.

Categories: Speed Workout
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In the past few years I would have already completed a few double centuries by mid July.  But this year I have just not had the interest to ride so far and until today I had not even ridden over 100 miles in a single ride.  You can see from this chart that my riding is lower than the past 4 years and I have to go back to 2006 when it was less.

However since I finally was allowed by the Cardiologist to stop taking the beta blocker, I seem to have more stamina to ride long.  John and I signed up for the Ulcer Century on August 6th so I have been trying to get in some longer rides.  On the past two Saturday’s Anne and I have taken the tandem and joined the Utah Vello ride up Hobble Creek.  We end up with 55 miles for that ride.  Both times I jumped on single bike after the ride to get in more miles.  Today I joined a couple guys from the Utah Velo ride up the Alpine Loop, then South Fork, to get 100 miles for the day.  Since I climbed 6,000 feet for the day, 3 times more than the Ulcer Century will be, I figure I am ready for it.

Categories: Training Program
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This morning Anne and I went for both a run up the Provo River trail and a bike ride up South Fork.  There were forecasts for showers this afternoon and sure enough it did rain.  After it cleared I figured it was fine to head out for another ride.  I wanted to climb up Squaw Peak doing some hill repeats during the climb. See this blog post on the details of the intervals.

Heading up from our Utah home on 4th North is usually an easy ride with very few cars.  Suddenly a pickup truck came out from a side street  (that had a stop sign) to my left to drive right across my path.  I had to swerve to avoid being hit.  Luckily the driver saw me just in time and hit his brakes.  I should have known I was in for one interesting ride.

After reaching the summit I looked down to the valley and could see it was raining heavily and there was several bolts of lightning.   Without the “Capture Lightning” app on my iPhone, I could only get this photo of the valley.  It is easy to see where it was raining.

At the top of the climb I was only getting a few sprinkles so I was hoping to beat a path down the mountain while the road was dry.  Once I reached the highway, it would be less than a mile to a large park where they have covered areas where I could escape the storm, should I run into it.  I reached the highway and it was now starting to rain.  After crossing the highway, I headed down when it started to really pour, like having buckets of water dumped on you.  Way too heavy of rain to safely ride so I pulled off the road into a side road.  I took a position slightly under a tree, but was afraid to be too close to the tree with all the lightning bolts striking around me.  I kept thinking at any time lightning would strike this tree and I was too close to be safe.

The rain left as fast as it came and soon I was on my way back down the canyon road.  When I reached home, Anne was a bit upset with me, being out on my bike in such a thunder and lighting storm.  I was just glad to be back and not hit by either a car or lightning.

Categories: Training Log
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Late this afternoon I headed out for a climb up Squaw Peak with the plan of doing some interval training during the climb.  It is a bit under 4 miles with little climbing up the Provo River Trail, then part on the Highway, to reach to road up Squaw Peak.  From there it is nearly a 1,800 feet climb over 4.2 miles.  With a rather constant grade, it is a great place to do some hill intervals.  I decided to ride as hard as I could while climbing 400 feet, then do a recovery for 200 more feet of climbing.  I would be able to repeat this for a total our three intervals before reaching the summit.

For a year now I have been on a beta-blocker for blood pressure.  It has been like a year in cycling prison because this stuff really lowers your heart rate, really slowing you down.  I was also taking another medication in addition, and had to cut both doses down to keep from going too low on my blood pressure.  During my 4 month follow-up visit to the Cardiologist last week, she decided to take me off one of the medications and offered a chance to decide.  That was an easy decision, so I finally stopped taking the beta blocker.

One of the reasons why I was originally put on the beta blocker was that my blood pressure went very high during a stress test.  Everyone’s blood pressure rises during a stress test, but mine went much higher than usual.  So after stopping the beta blocker I wanted to get some blood pressure readings during intense climbing so I took a wrist blood pressure monitor with me.

Here is the data from the average of the hill repeats I have done.   On my latest workout I wanted to get my blood pressure, so I had to come to a stop and stand on the ground, otherwise I would get an error on the blood pressure monitor.  I was able to get stopped rather quickly at the end of the interval.  The reading should be fairly indicative because you can see the heart rate on the blood pressure monitor was close to my my maximum heart rate during the interval.  It has been along time since I was able to take my heart rate up above 170 bpm.  I was happy that the blood pressure readings were so reasonable during these intervals.  I pulled out my data from 3 years ago when I did a similar hill interval workouts up Squaw Peak and Thomas Grade.  You can see my climbing speed declined since then, even though I was pushing my heart rate higher.  However in 2008 I was in top form and was training for both the Everest Challenge and the Furnace Creek 508.

This shows graphically the vertical climbing speed (VAM) for each of the hill repeats I have done.  The vertical climbing speed is measured in meters per hour.  It will change depending on the grade and typically for every one percent increase in average gradient increases VAM by 50.  Since Thomas Grade and Squaw Peak average grade is within 1%, they can be compared directly.  Improvements would show an increasing VAM and a decreasing average heart rate.  My data shows the opposite.

The photo shows the intervals up along Squaw Peak.

Categories: Training Log
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I previously talked about getting back to doing interval training on the bike.  Today I did another set of intervals, abotu 7 minutes hard and 3 minute recover, with four repeats. It is a relatively flat course that included a couple miles of warm-up from our house and then a straight shot, with no need for stop signs or traffic lights during each of the 7 minute intervals. The blue sections on the map are the intervals done at speed and the red sections the recovery portions.

Using a circular course allows me to average the 4 segments so as to somewhat cancel the effect of the wind. This allows a comparison between different dates. I have data from eleven workouts, the first in March 2008 and the 11th today. The last three were done while on a beta blocker and you can see the significant reduction in average heart rate and average speed.  Overall I am happy because I have my average speed back up to 20.5 mph, the same as a year ago.  What is interesting is that to achieve this speed, my average heart rate during the intervals segments was 143 bpm, while a year ago, for the same average speed, my heart rate averaged 155 bpm.

So although I am not going to be as fast, I need to get back to doing some speed workouts to improve my conditioning. Next up will be some hill repeats.

Categories: Speed Workout
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I am one very lucky guy.  Many people I know need to find someone to bike or run with and often rely on a cycling or running club, or some personal friend, or they may ride or run alone.  I bike with 3 different cycling clubs and some buddies and sometimes bike and run by myself, but most of my biking and running is with family members, general my wife, Anne.  Since our kids are all grown we have the luxury of biking and running together.  Sometimes I get a chance to bike and run with my kids, but since they live away it is not as often as we would like.  It lets my sports often be a family affair, instead of something that always takes me away from the family.

I have a rather detailed training log and have revised it so I have real data on who I bike and run with, or when I am solo.  These charts tell it all.  The family percentage is even higher than it appears because when Anne and I bike together with a bike club, I record it as miles with that club.

Categories: Training Log
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Last year I did interval training on the bicycle several times but the last time was last September.  On that occasion I was then on a beta blocker and was clearly slower.  I guess that was enough to discourage me from doing speedwork but today I decided to get going again.  I repeated the same course I have done in the past so I could compare with my past workouts.

It is a relatively flat course that included a couple miles of warm-up from our house and then a straight shot, with no need for stop signs or traffic lights during each of the 7 minute intervals. The blue sections on the map are the intervals done at speed and the red sections the recovery portions. From the map it would as if I could fit in a 5th interval at the end, but there are too many stop lights and I am way too tired to try a 5th one. It seems as if all I can do is ride the 4.5 miles back home.

You can see the four intervals, followed by the recovery period from this heart rate curve. During the 7  minute interval I push as hard as I can and still hold the pace for 7 minutes.   This was my heart rate curve for today’s workout.

Ignoring the false reading during the warmup section, you can see in the above curve the four periods where I did the 7 minute speedwork.  The affects of the beta block are significant when you look at the same curve below from only one year ago, when I was not yet taking the beta blocker.  There is a much more pronounced heart rate buildup during the 7 minute interval sections.

Using a circular course allows me to average the 4 segments so as to somewhat cancel the effect of the wind. This allows a comparison between different dates.  I have data from ten workouts, the first in March 2008 and the 10th today.  The last two were done while on a beta blocker and you can see the significant reduction in average heart rate and average speed.

So although I am not going to be as fast, I need to get back to doing some speed workouts to improve my conditioning.  Next up will be some hill repeats.

Categories: Training Log
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Although many people keep track of the miles on their car and know when to take it in for an oil change, they often neglect keeping track of components on their bicycle, or they rely on a local bike shop to check it out.

For years I have kept a detailed log of all my training.  Even after writing an article about online training logs, I still keep up my Excel spreadsheet.   Today I upload my GPS data a couple of websites (Strava and Garmin Connect) and to a local computer based program (Ascent).  One might think that a website like Strava.com should be more than enough, and might be for most people, for me personally I want to do more, including:

• Chart cycling and running miles separately
• Track how I am doing compared with prior years at this same time
• Track for both my wife and I together since mostly bike and run together
• Track details on mileage on various bike components on various bikes
• Track which club or non-club miles I cycle.

So I take the time to enter into my Excel based training log, which is setup so it also keeps track of which bikes were ridden by myself and my wife.  Using formulas in Excel, as I enter a daily workout rather quickly, it then computes a lot of data

Bike Component Wear

Using data from when I have had to replace components in the past, I can estimate the percent wear on each item.  This is what it looks like.

I check this periodically and noted I had better check the chain wear on my wife’s Trek Madone 5.1.  Sure enough the chain checker tool showed wear to 0.75, which I use as a time to replace, so as soon as I finish this blog entry, I will go do that.

For the tear wear, I keep track of how many miles the tire has been on the front and on the rear so I can estimate wear.  I use a factor of 2X for rear wear compared with wear while on the front.

Who I Bike Wtih

It all might seem a big complicated, but after creating the training log, it is very easy to enter the daily workouts.  Selecting a single drop down will allow me to choose that it was something my wife and I did together, only I did or only she did, and all the other numbers are automatically calculated from that.

One other feature I added for this year was tracking which group I bike with, one of the 3 bike clubs I belong to, solo, or with someone in my family.  This is what it looks like so far this year.  Note that if my wife and I join a club ride together, that is where I count the miles so the “Family” category is just with someone in the family.

Our time in Utah is more during the summer so that will change.  Biking with ACTC is not so common as it once was.

These two examples are the type of information you can get if you keep your own training log.  In my case it is really a training log for both myself and my wife and since most of our workouts are together, that makes things easy to track and also makes life a lot of fun.

How is My Training Going

I can easily see how my running and cycling are doing compared with prior years. This shows how I did in 2010 compared with the prior years.

I have friends who don’t even use a cyclometer to cycle with and have no idea how many miles they have ridden.  But I also notice these same guys are always having some issue with cassette wear because they didn’t change their chain until it was too late.  It might be the engineer in me that loves to see the data so I know how I am doing and how my bikes are doing.

Categories: Training Log
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