What should a training diary contain?
What should a training diary contain?
A diary isn’t just a means to recording what riding you have done, but also to get into the nitty gritty of your training.
Alongside the raw data – distance, average speed, heart rate, power output (if you use a power meter) and so on, it should also be used to assess the ride and its impact on you as a rider.
Both Gallagher and Clancy believe in the importance of a brief but detailed analysis of the ride.
Gallagher says: “Along with an overview of the ride and raw data you need, which is probably most critical, it’s also important to have one or two paragraphs of information to explain the ride – what was done, what wasn’t, how it felt.
“As a coach, I can use those comments to see whether the rider may have been tired or stressed. If we have a little bit of information with it, for example, ‘I worked late the night before and didn’t sleep well. When I got up this morning I felt off,’ then that can help explain the data, and means it is easier to make an assumption on what needs to be done in the coming days.”
Clancy follows the same philosophy. “Usually my training diary contains two main things,” he says. “First things first, I state exactly what I have done. For example, it’s a two-hour road session with three 20-minute blocks of zone three at 330 watts. Then I’ll state a couple more facts – average heart rate and so on.
“Then underneath that, the second paragraph, will be how it felt and the perceived effort – so was it more or less than you’d expect for that sort of effort. Some days you will say it felt relatively easy and you could have done more or felt like you had something in reserve at the end, and on other days you will be saying you felt absolute dogshit and it was an effort to get over.”
Gallagher believes that those comments are vital not just for personal reflections but to put some context into the data recorded for the ride.
“You might be able to see just from the data that power has been down and their heart rate has been a bit erratic,” he says, “but without any comments about how the ride felt it’s hard to put that into context.”
The analysis, however, must be accurate and honest for it to be any use – which brings us nicely onto the next point.