The advantages of a training diary.

The importance of a training diary.

(Due to sketchy internet here in Sardinia this blog is 2 days later than when I wrote it, so put yourself back in time 48 hrs) :-)

Six weeks of Cotes d’Azur training.

I am sat in the departure lounge waiting for my flight back to the UK, this is only going to be a very short stay in the UK as I have flights for the very next day (03:00 alarm call).

When you are during a load of training you tend to get wound up into the day and the hour and even the minute. Each day you forget what has happen the day before and the week before. As an athlete I feel you sometimes need to look back and see where you were a week ago or a month back, and more sometimes.

I look back now at December 24th, yes, Christmas eve at my Mum’s house for Christmas and there I was doing my first session on rollers targeting 20 minutes at 120-140 watts without my knee hurting. Yesterday, I went out and rode for 4 hours 40 minutes. In that session I did 3 intervals (from memory (which is bad)), 2 x 20 minutes and one 30 minutes. These were all at 280 watts.

Even if I look at the difference in my fitness and especially my knee over the last 4-6 weeks things have always seemed to improve steadily. As Laurence at Athlete Service said to me, it is all about slowly upping what I am doing and seeing if I get a reaction to it. There were of course moments (almost every other day), where I had twinges or aches and pains in the knees and quads. At the time as I mentioned above, you get seriously down about it as you are so fully in the moment and not looking at the long term.

Today in Sardinia, dam rain...!

I think this is a really good thing to remember and I need to do it as much as the next person! I have been keeping a training diary for 6 years now, 4 years of which was during my rowing. It is good to see where you were and where you are now physiology wise. I sometimes laugh too when I look back (especially at the rowing), when you have had a bad outing (in rowing) or had a bad ride you write some very funny comments in your diary... I would love to share some of the best comments with you but most of them are full of swearing and anger. The tame comments are “What an awful session rowing, I reallyy don’t know why I even bothered getting my boat out today. Worth a look to see what the second hand value is as I certainly can’t row for s**t!” Its good you can laugh after these incident though, most of these are trivial but at the time you are in the moment and you feel truly awful about your training, technique, fitness and speed.... But really when you look at it there are so many other outside influences that can effect this.

So everyone, get writing a daily training diary, you may find it funny in years to come!!

Thanks for your time reading, hope this blog entry was beneficial to some of you!