Take it on the Run

Marathon Training Calendar

I was starting to manually type in my marathon training schedule to my Google Calendar when I decided to do a quick search for an importable calendar.  Thanks to this site, I just saved myself a ton of time.  Thought I'd pass it on. Thanks Matt and Sara!

Medals 4 Mettle

Fitsugar posted today about Medals 4 Mettle, a nonprofit that donates full-marathon, half-marathon and triathlon medals from athletes to individuals who confront challenges on a daily basis.  From their website:

"Its mission is to celebrate and reward the individual and collective courage of all human beings by facilitating the gifting of marathon finisher’s medals from marathoners to people who have demonstrated similar mettle, or courage. The recipients can be any age and might have exhibited such mettle by dealing with disease, handicaps or any similar challenge. Marathon runners around the world, and others who have won medals, give their medals to Medals4Mettle. Then our nationwide network of physicians and others award these medals to those who might not be able to run a marathon, but are in their own marathon to continue to live their life."

What a simple way to brighten someone's day.  I am going to send in my half-marathon medal soon.  You can find a list of local chapters on their website with mailing instructions.

Daily Mile Update

When I first mentioned the Daily Mile I listed a few things that I would like to see modified with the site.   I also sent a short list to the site administrators in their comment section.  I was happy to find that they promptly responded to my questions and that they also looked up this website.

I wrote: "I'd love a way to track my average and maximum heart rates for each run. A way to graph these results in relation to distance and pace would be super as well.

I also wish that mileage wasn't rounded up.  If I run 6.5 miles, I don't want my stats to say I ran 7."

They replied: "Thanks for taking the time to write! We'll be adding some more advanced options for logging workouts in the future. The ability to record HR has been requested by many people, so we'll definitely look into doing that.

We round up the mileage to keep the interface clean. We'll be improving the profile graph in the future to make it more precise, let you view past weeks, etc."

I appreciate their reply and I look forward to seeing these modifications in the future.

I added a widget to my sidebar from Daily Mile that lists my upcoming races (and how long I have to train for the next one).  I also moved all of my historical run date from my sidebar to my Daily Mile profile.  I think I will begin phasing out my record-keeping in favor of the Daily Mile stats.  I enjoy being able to look at different breakdowns of the data, such as my mileage by month:

February (to date): 43.05 miles
January: 62 miles
December: 34.75 miles
November: 31.25 miles
October: 26 miles
September: 43.45 miles
August: 38.2 miles
July: 60.95 miles
June: 43.65 miles
May: 47.05 miles
April: 16 miles

Pretty fun, eh?  I still have no "friends" on the site.  Let me know if anyone out there joins!

Daily Mile

I read about Daily Mile on Lifehacker a few weeks ago and decided to give this training tracking program a try. I have entered all of my runs from the 1st of the year until now.  I don't know if I will switch to this method over my current website tracking method, but it has some great features that I highly recommend to other runners out there. For each run you enter the date, mileage, time, how you felt, and any notes (I note whether my run was on a treadmill or outdoors).

This screen shot shows the weekly training log up top.  You can see that I have run 13 miles so far this week and I have run 55 miles since January 1st.  I have two complaints here: First, the tracker rounds up.  For example, the 7 mile run recorded was really a 6.5 mile run.  I wish it was more accurate. Second, If I run 6.5 miles in 65 minutes on a treadmill, there is no way to take into account variable speeds or cool downs.  In reality, most of my run was at a faster pace.

The lower portion of the screenshot shows my overall stats for January.  I ran 55.25 miles (a more accurate figure than above) which was a total of 9 hours and 8 minutes of training (wow!).  My longest distance was 6.8 and my average pace was 9.55.  6 of my runs were on a treadmill and 4 of my runs were outside.

The lower portion of this page shows the detail for all of my January runs, organized by week. In addition to these features, the site also allows you to search for races and tag your profile with your intended participation.  It allows you to set a running goal (5K, half-marathon, etc).  It also has a social networking component where you can add friends and encourage each other (and possibly also find local running partners). Feel free to add me (pammeg AT gmail Dot com).

If they would add a heart rate tracking component to the site I would fully switch over in a heartbeat (pun).  Maybe it will come at a later day.