Need or want are the Mother of Invention, or something like that. Anyway, I wanted a better way to track my running efforts. Specifically, I wanted something that helped me easily track and count miles covered in various footwear in a yearly breakdown. This motivates me and is fun to have statistics on when it comes up in forums or conversation. The trouble was/is, I don’t speak very much techno-geek at all. Many times when I hear it being spoken, or read directions glibly referring to the concepts, the words hover over my head mockingly, then woosh away when I make any attempt to understand. English, but not, for me.
The last two years, it worked well enough to use the Runner’s Log simple iPad app for logging my running miles, and if I wasn’t trying to differentiate between types of footwear within a given year, it would still be great. I even thought about contacting the makers of the app and telling them of my specific goals, because I have had a little contact with them and they have been quite friendly. I may still do that, however, I don’t see it getting changed NOW, and I am ready to keep track of things at the beginning of this new year. Plus, I have to wonder if they would consider it worth their effort, since I doubt the bulk of their customers keep track of exactly which shoe. Still, they already have a place to enter shoes, so they just need to figure out a way to show that statistic more clearly on a yearly basis.
So it was that I put myself through a mini-course on making google spreadsheets. Even that was challenging, because I kept coming up against techno-geek language and would not know what to do next. Click here for more information, the google help site said. At one point, I had about 8 tabs open on my compute in 3 different windows. It was not working.
I was relieved to find this tutorial for business owners on youtube (see video below). After watching this, then re-watching it while I went through steps myself, I now have what I consider a decent enough spread sheet that will add up my weekly miles along the horizontal axis (which helps a lot with making training decisions), and my miles per footwear in the vertical (which helps me see how I am progressing overall with barefoot miles – last year about 83% of my miles were barefoot out of 999 miles total).
In order to keep it visually manageable (showing up without much scrolling), I only listed weeks for the time segments. I will add the miles of each day to a running total for the week under each footwear column. I don’t need to worry about route or weather or time for this goal. All I want to do is log miles.
Another thing about having it on my Google Drive, is that I can manage it from any device or any location. Or I can just keep little notes in hard to remember places and add miles when I get home, because we all do that sometimes, right? Either way, I nearly doubled both my total mileage and my barefoot mileage last year, greatly due to training for the City of Trees marathon. I don’t have goals for doubling again, but I won’t know unless I keep track!
(if you want access to my template, which can be easily copied and relabeled to suit you, sign up for my weekly newsletter in the upper right of my website above.)