BeginnerTriathlete is No More!

I’ve been tracking my miles on BeginnerTriathlete.com since 2009 (I’ll be calling it BT for short). All of my “month in review” screenshots of my calendar are from BT (here’s November 2025 from 2 weeks ago as an example), and BT tallied the monthly totals nicely for me. All of my “year in review” posts have screenshots of monthly graphs, checks of my weight, yearly totals, etc, and that came from BT. (Check out 2024 in review or 2023 in review as examples.) I track my shoe mileage easily through my run workouts. And ALL of my workouts and post-workout notes have been uploaded there.

And now that’s all gone.

Sometime in mid-November, there was a banner put across the top of BT saying they were shutting down in early December. I didn’t notice it until early December where I basically had a weekend to deal with all my data there. They showed how to export all your data as a .csv file, so I did that. That puts ALL my info from last 16+ years into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is super hard to read, as the boxes are collapsed, but at least it’s all THERE. It’s not NEARLY as easy to find as it was on BT, but it exists.

My .csv file is 4.6 megabytes. The .csv file that I downloaded with my teaching contract and the info for the 2 classes I’ll be teaching and the darkroom tech role I have next semester is 2 kilobytes (2K, not 2MB). So my workout data is a file that’s 2300 times larger.

It’s 6400+ rows tall, and 46 rows wide... that’s about 300,000 cells of possible data!

Down to row 6400. And notice how none of the cells with notes
are readable unless I click on them to expand them. Yikes.

BT was alive for 1 day past when they said it'd be, so I had some hope that maybe they’d still stick around! But that didn’t last. When I refreshed my training calendar last week, this popped up:

So I’ve started tracking my miles on 2 other sites starting on Dec 1.

I had a Training Peaks account (free) from back in 2010 when Coach Jen coached me for 2 months. It’s a common platform for coaches to upload workouts for their athletes. (I don’t know if Jen is still using that or if she’s moved on to something else, as 2010 is a LIFETIME ago when speaking of tech). The calendar isn’t color coded as nicely as BT was, the weekly totals aren’t helpful, but you can see weight data easily. One big issue I’ve been having is it doesn’t always save the notes I add for each workout (like all my splits) - they just poof away once I add them and save them, and that’s worrisome.

The other calendar I started was through Final Surge. Someone on a BT forum mentioned it was similar to BT when they announced their closing. The color coding is better, the weekly totals are better, but it’s harder to see weight data.

Overall I like Final Surge better than Training Peaks, but Training Peaks seems more likely to be around in 10 years, and BT closing has made that a real issue for me! So I’m double-reporting my data right now just to be safe. We’ll see where I end up... thinking it will be Final Surge.

Also, I’m still getting used to adding shoes under my running activities so I can keep tracking my shoe mileage. They both offer that, and that’s important to me as well! Before BT closed, I grabbed a screenshot of all of my shoes I’ve worn and tracked through BT (I don’t know when I started tracking this, but it wasn’t right away in 2009):

And here was my “current” list, where I’m really only using the bottom one:

Which means after the last few runs, I have about 575 miles
on my current shoes. Time to update soon!

A blog reader emailed me about BT closing about 2 days after, saying that he thinks my blog convinced him to start tracking his workouts on BT because of my blog. (Sorry!!) And he noted that he saw "something on Reddit where 'Alice' broke the news and said she doesn’t even have access to anyone’s data anymore." It sounds like it's GONE. Their site is now all of their articles, but no possible way to track workouts - it's basically an archived blog format now.

p.s. I don’t like to just rely on my Garmin app as I HATE navigating through time on that. For example, when I did the 8K CC race last month and wanted to compare it to the same one I did 2 years ago, I could go to BT and change the year and month in a few clicks and be looking at that race (and the training around it) from 2023. But in the Garmin app, I have to click back one month at a time. AND wait for a second or 2 for each month to load. It’s clunky. It appears that Training Peaks and Final Surge can jump through time quickly as well.

p.p.s. I also saved all of my “race reports” from BT as individual PDFs so I don’t lose all those splits and other data.