DMGBuilding the Training Log
I'm making good progress on the Training Log web app, and it's been a learning experience. Since I decided to push back playing with any AJAX, the technical stuff hasn't been as interesting as the surprising design challenges.
I've found in the past that "dogfooding" is a huge advantage. You don't see the kinds of things a tool needs until you actually use it. So I got a very, very sketchy implementation going on the first day. Nothing fancy: let me enter workouts, and list those workouts blog-style.
What became immediately obvious was that a blog-style listing of workouts doesn't belong on the front page. It doesn't belong anywhere. A training log is not a blog. A blog is a storytelling tool, a training log is a data analysis tool.
The interesting thing about a training log is not the individual entries. It's the relationships. I may enter a data point indicating that I just finished my Monday night "oak tree run" in 43:17, but that's not interesting unless you can compare it to my last run on that route, or of that distance.
But take it a step further. If I did a hard leg workout yesterday, finishing a minute slower today is just fine. But if I've been doing intervals and other speed work, and had a rest day before this run, being slower is cause for concern: am I overtraining?
And, if you're trying to lose weight, or build a running mileage base, you want aggregate as well as comparative data. How many miles did I run this week? What was my average pace? How many calories did I burn?
So just presenting a series of workouts, blog-style, is pretty useless. And even a calendar view only tells part of the story. A truly useful feature would be a graph that shows both my average running pace over time, overlayed with the frequency and intensity of other types of workouts. If I'm training for a marathon, and I see that my pace improves when I lighten my weight training load, I can adjust acordingly. Likewise if I find that working my upper body and core helps.
Just like a metronome helps train a musician's sense of time, a heart rate monitor and GPS helps train an athlete's sense of pacing and distance. I hope this tool will do the same for my sense of what workouts to do and when. Ultimately, I want to train less, enjoy it more, and be more fit as a result.
So, this'll be an adventure for me, both as a programmer, and as an athlete.