December In Review: Using a NEW TRAINING LOG (and Hating It)

I posted a few weeks ago how BeginnerTriathlete has died. It was where I tracked my workouts since 2009. Ouch.

So here's a glance at December's calendar from FinalSurge instead of BeginnerTriathlete:

What do you notice? I'll tell you what: it's unreadable at that size. Compare that to my November training in review post that showed this calendar from BeginnerTriathlete:

Hey look!.... it's legible!! And easy to read! Even showing weigh-ins! And splitting up trainer time from outside biking workouts!

None of that is true with FinalSurge.

OK... about the only noticeable thing that is nicer about FinalSurge is that the TIME OF DAY of the workout is displayed on the calendar. BT used to place your swim, bike, or run workouts in the correct order based on time of day, but strength workouts or "sports" workouts (like trainer rides) would always show up at the bottom as they didn't have a "time of day" that you could note.

Here's FinalSurge at normal screen size (if looking at it from a computer, not a phone) showing gray runs, black strength, and green bike workouts, and with the time of day noted at the top of them (at least the ones where I recorded the time of day):

Oh, and I just realized... if I go back to FinalSurge and make the browser window really (unnatually) narrow, then the data shifts a little and makes it a BIT more readable here:

Being able to see that a little clearer also shows the weekly totals at the lower right of each week. It totals run distance and time (good), strength time (good), and trainer time (good). But any weeks I have trainer time AND outdoor rides, it gives me total "bike" time as trainer and outdoor combined, but then with outdoor miles recorded (not as good). I can't see outside time and trainer time noted seperately, even though they are seperate options for logging workouts. (The 12th, 17th, and 20th were my only outdoor rides last month.)

Oh, and one more decent thing is the bright purple you see on the calendar. That was noting an injury when I hurt my shoulder lifting a lot. It's still an issue (and I'm still not doing shoulders right now), but it really seemed to turn a corner last week and start feeling better! Less SHARP pain now, and more of an ache.

Finally, one thing that stinks about FinalSurge is even though it's got a normal "monthly" calendar, there's no quick and easy total that it shows for the month. BT had totals at the bottom of every month, whether it was a completed month or still in progress. With FinalSurge, I can "create a report," but again, it lumps trainer time in with bike time. So it shows my bike totals as 18:59:31 and 29.43 miles. I have to go in and subtract out my "outdoor miles" from those 19 hours to split it into 16 hours and 32 minutes of trainer time, and 2 hours 27 minutes and 31 seconds for 29.43 outdoor miles on my mountain bike. Lame. *

So December totals were:

• SWIM: 0 yards (no pool access)
• BIKE: 29.43 miles
• TRAINER TIME: 16 hours and 32 mins
• RUN: 113.68 miles (BIG!!!)
• STRENGTH TIME: 54 hours and 3 mins (quite decent!)

That run total just happened natually! I wasn't trying to get in any extra miles before the end of the year... it's just the way the long runs lined up in December. It was my biggest monthly run mileage since January of 2016! Nearly 10 years since running that far in a month!


* After noting that I had to calcuate my trainer time from my overall bike time, I realized there's a "Group by Activity Sub-type" option. So that way it shows trainer workouts seperately. So that's nice. But it then shows every kind of run workout totalled seperately, like tempo runs vs intervals vs easy vs long runs. So I'll just have to do a normal report for MOST of my numnbers, and then do a "Group by Activity Sub-type" option for trainer time vs "actual" biking. It's clunky, but a decent work-around. Still... I miss my BT... :(