7 Weeks in Infographics (Training 7/7-8/24)

It's hard to believe that it has been almost 10 weeks since I ran Grandma's Marathon! I've been pretty busy with work and moving apartments. I've still been thinking about blogging and have number of posts floating around in my head. For now though, I'll just be posting some pretty, Strava generated summaries of my training since Grandma's.

If you want to see more frequent (daily?) updates on my training, feel free to follow me on Strava. I've migrated from DailyMile to Strava for a variety of reasons the most important probably being better data management in particular upload/download capabilities. I also started logging my regular bike commutes to give better visibility to all of my aerobic activity. I believe these commute minutes played a key role in developing aerobic capacity during my build up for Grandma's Marathon.

Feel free to ask questions via the comments section below or on twitter. Here are three images summarizing the past 7 weeks of training:

Nothing fancy here, just consistent miles with a workout (in yellow) and a long run (dark green) each week. This segment is capped by a 56:17 10 mile at the Crim 10 Mile in Flint, MI (red). 

I will say that some of my long runs were actually workouts. I did a pretty nice 2-3-2-3-2 (mile segments) workout with Kyle on August 16th. We also did a good 4-3-2-1 (mile segments) workout on August 2nd.

As I mentioned, one reason I started using Strava (and the Suunto Ambit2 S) was to track my cycle commutes which I believe is a key factor to aerobic development and injury prevention. More on this at some later time...

Finally, I really like this view. It is essential that you wear some sort of time keeping device and log your workout time regularly (this is where an endurance sports watch comes in handy as Strava can automatically be updated with this information), but it provides a really good top level view of your overall training. I will add that Strava uses your GPS data and only credits you for moving time. This will hurt your overall time spent but help your average paces as they calculate average pace based on moving time only. 

I disagree with using moving time, but I'm not sure if you're able to present the data in another format on Strava. I'll also say that I don't like that Strava doesn't show any of the splits you take during an activity. It will only show mile splits. This adds an additional couple steps if you want your Strava record to include splits for segments not run mile to mile. For example, the splits I took during our 4-3-2-1 workout aren't reflected in Strava as the segments didn't start exactly on a mile split. I could be just a Strava n00b, but this lack of inclusion seems to me a rather annoying omission.

How has your training been over the last 9 weeks?

Are you using Strava?

Read more about logging training in this guest post by Dan Clay McDowell titled "Logging in the Pacific Northwest."