This has been a crazy month. The coldest of my life, in fact. While most of my peers are preparing for the season in warmer weather, I’m here in Chicago during a January so cold that even the natives are complaining. But despite the cold, life is pretty good. I’m taking a lighter course load at school this quarter and working on projects that I really enjoy, and despite the cold I have been getting out of the house and training with other human beings more frequently.
One goal I have this year is to track my data and try to make sense of it in a meaningful way. I know that I’m a heavy sweater, so I’m stepping on a scale before and after each workout. My goal is to minimize my weight swings, which are frequently more than 10 lbs in a day. I’m tracking my hours of sleep and my waking heart rate and correlating it with how well I’m training, and how productive I am with school and work. I’m tracking my hours of training, and I have kept up my “gold star†system, where at the end of the day I ask myself, “are you a better triathlete than when you woke up?†(I must have started off the year as a pretty bad triathlete because I have already logged a dozen gold-star-days– last year I only had 20 by the time I raced in late March).
What data do you track? How do you keep track of your recovery and how do you measure success?
oh yeah, and I did make it to Austin for a short thaw last week: