Journaling your runs is a great way to measure progress and track mileage to learn about yourself as a runner and be able to look back at what works best for you. Keeping track of workouts, mileage and pace, lifting programs, nutrition, and sleep are all helpful things to measure and record to try to reach your health, fitness or weight loss goals. There are so many factors that affect how you feel each day. Recording how you feel each day with either a written prompt or a scale with smiley faces can be helpful to understand what could have been done differently to make you feel better. 

Let's say one week you feel more fatigue than normal and that your workout was very slow. You write down what you did below. 

July 8th 2023
6X800m 2 minutes jogging rest 2 mile warm up and cool down (7 miles total)
(3:43, 3:43, 3:37, 3:42, 3:52, 3:48)
Felt like I hit a wall on the 5th rep and held on for the last. Dynamic drills before and didn’t feel up to core exercises after. 

But you look back at a similar workout you did 2 weeks ago

June 23rd 2023
5X 800m 2 minutes jogging rest 2 miles warm up and cold down (6.5 miles total)
(3:50, 3:47, 3:45, 3:45, 3:39)
Felt great, strong and like I kept my form the whole time. Dynamic drills before and  5 minutes of core training after. 

And you see that the times are similar and notice that although you felt bad during your workout, the times were similar to the last workout and that you even added another rep. This can make you feel like you’re headed in the right direction and that you might want to consider other factors like sleep, nutrition or hydration being factors that can alter how you feel during the day or workout. 

Sleep, hydration, nutrition, time you ate, recovery from physiological stresses throughout the day, stressors the day prior, psychological stressors, temperature and weather, menstrual cycle, altitude, terrain of activity, social support, gear used and your environmental factors. 

Recording these things can help you find out what helps you feel the best to optimize your training. 

For Example, you start to develop a stress reaction or fracture and you learn that causes can be a rapid increase in volume or intensity of training, poor recovery and/or poor nutrition. You look back at the last few weeks of training and realize that you bumped up the mileage from 20 miles to 30 in one week. Maybe you get so distracted at work that you forget about lunch and skip some meals. Or you are so stressed about a life or family event that you haven’t really been sleeping well. 

Many people record the following and learn shortly after that they might actually have celiacs disease or be lactose intolerant based on how they felt during the day with those specific foods. Trying to cut out gluten or dairy products in their diet enhanced their quality of life that they didn’t know they needed. 

Another example, for women or those who menstruate is the effect your cycle has on your energy and athletic performance. Generally the first two weeks of your cycle, your follicular phase, you have less hormones meaning more benefits in high intensity and strength training. During the second two weeks, or luteal phase, hormones are higher during menstruation and you would benefit from lower intensity exercises and recovery due to high hormone levels and lower energy. Interested in learning more about how your menstrual cycle impacts your training? Click here to find out more.

Knowing where to start can be difficult since there are a lot of things that can be written each day. A good start would be to use the Believe Training Journal by Lauren Fleshman and Roisin McGettigan-Dumas, professional runners, that offer a year-long training journal filled with motivation, advice, pace charts and so much more. Recording your training and other information in the journal each day helps keep you accountable and motivated to put the shoes on the next day. 

Interested in the Training Journal and getting yourself started or making improvements in your training block? Click here to Buy their book and get started yourself.

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