Not necessarily the most obvious piece of training kit, but useful all the same: a slimline filofax. I’ve had it for years, never quite managing to work out what to do with it.
I’ve repurposed it as my training diary – not entirely a ridiculous concept. I had been thinking of using Day One, or my usual (phone/computer) diary etc, but none of that really seemed to work. My calendar is already a mess with work commitment and adding more detail to it would just make me want to run in the opposite direction. I do keep an eye on that calendar to ensure that I leave time for cycling etc, but it doesn’t work as a record.
So I dug out the filofax and bought a week-on-two-pages academic diary to take me through to LEL next year (which it does perfectly: ends on the last day of LEL). This allows me to see the week at a glance, to plan out the workouts – my current training plan is fairly simple: keep building endurance until the end of the year, so mostly just riding, plus some gym work and pilates for core. The space allows me to add some detail after the session if I want to, and there’s space at the beginning of the week to add week goals.
Added to that, I have a stash of notes pages at the back with some tabs to separate them – general notes, clothing notes, equipment notes, nutrition notes. This allows me to keep ideas and, later, plan out strategy etc for the ride.
I do keep information electronically – Evernote is useful for stashing ideas from websites etc – but ultimately I need to make some sense of it, and I still seem to find it easier to make sense of things when I can scan them to review them. It’s not as straightforward to do that in an app, for me.
Evening Breeze ride – 12.2 miles; 13.1 mph; 112W avg.