WKO Calendar Page

Last Saturday's wet weather gave me an excuse to have a big clean up in WKO. I set the season to start from Mon 3rd November 2007 and went through each entry on the calendar page, line by line until it contained rationalised and homogeneous information. Over the last 15 months I have adopted a system of named workout codes as follows:

AR = Active Recovery

E  = Endurance

Te = Tempo

Th  = Threshold

Vm = VO2 max

Ac = Anaerobic capacity

NP = Neuromuscular power

I also use "SS" to denote sweet spot for a workout that has been E + Te + Th throughout, but with an overall normalised power between 85 and 95%. In other words, it's not necessarily as evenly paced as say a 40 min threshold effort, but it's an appreciable effort over an appreciable duration.  Oh, and when the season starts there will be RR and TT to denote road races and time trials too. Remember when you want to search a database it's much simpler if you have less to type.

OK, so that's not exactly ground breaking but it's practical. So "E + NP" becomes fairly self explanatory. The result is that I have a simple, search friendly log of completed workouts.

I add more detail into the Workout Goal field. Because WKO is a retrospective tool, I prefer to use this field to describe exactly what I did, but again in simple terms. So my entry may read "E 120mins @75% + NP 8x 8secs" or "E 60mins @70% + Th 40mins @100% + Te 60mins @80%". It's useful to summarise the average intensities that I exercised at, just the need to record it for neatness sake makes you analyse the power data. This in turn ensures that I make sure that what I did was what I intended in terms of duration and intensity. It isn't just about keeping a neat log, it's the process that goes into being able to finalise the log on a day to day basis that counts. It's a part of the training discipline that is as important as making sure that your tyres are in good condition.

Finally I use the Notes field for, well just notes! That might be how tired I was, the ambient temperature, whether it was a trainer ride etc etc. I've learnt not to waffle to much here. If you do write too much,  it becomes difficult to sift out the really important data sometime in the future. I find that it's best to stick to details that may have made the workout different or unusual in some way.