The Athlete's Diary

Chapter 7: Planning Ahead

Training Plans

People training for marathons, century bike rides, and many athletic events want to follow training plans (also known as training programs) which have been developed for that purpose. You can find training plans in books, in magazine articles, and now, on computer as well. The Athletes Diary gives you the ability to create your own training plans from scratch, to enter them yourself from magazine articles, to create them by duplicating some of your own previous training, or by using a training plan obtained from Stevens Creek Software.

The usual disclaimer applies do not embark on any training program without the advice of your physician.

Setting up a Training Schedule

You can enter future workouts using the Data Entry window, but its even simpler to use the Week-at-a-Glance (Calendar). Just click and hold the mouse on a blank area of the day on which you want to do the training (or on the line with the date itself). A pop-up menu will appear, showing your memorized routes, and, at the bottom, Other and Use Saved Workout

If you select one of the memorized workouts with the mouse, that workout will be scheduled for that day. Youll notice the totals increase at the same time, so you can see how much training youre planning for yourself!

If you select Other, the program takes the date you clicked on, copies it to the Data Entry window, and activates the Data Entry window so you can enter that other workout. When youre finished, click on the calendar (or use the Button Bar) to return to the Week-at-a-Glance if you want to enter more workouts.

The scroll bar in the Week-at-a-Glance window normally stops at the end of the log. However, if you want to enter data for the following week, just click on the down or right arrow, and the calendar will advance one week.

After you actually do the workouts you have entered, you can use the Modify function from either the Log, Journal, or Week-at-a-Glance windows to modify that entry and add the appropriate information the actual time, a comment, etc. Of course you can also use Delete if you skip that workout.

Use Select By Criteria, then select out your future activities by date and you can print out a nice neat training schedule in either the Log or Week-at-a-Glance format.

Saved Workouts

Memorized workouts have two limitations you can have a maximum of 20 of them, and each one consists of only a single workout. Saved Workouts are a second category which allows you to store individual or multiple workouts in separate files (rather than in your log, like memorized workouts), from where they can be recalled and entered into your log in a single step. For example, you might set up a typical week saved workout that includes a masters swim workout Tuesday and Thursday, a track workout Wednesday, bike rides on Monday and Friday, and a long run on Sunday. Now when youre planning your future training you can enter all of these workouts in a single step.

To create a saved workout, enter a workout in your log, only entering information which you will want to recall each time. If the workout is a fixed distance, for example, dont enter the time. The actual date or day of the week doesnt matter, but if you want to save a series of entries as one saved workout, the relative date of each workout is important, so enter the date appropriately.

Unlike creating a memorized workout, to create a saved workout you must actually enter the workout in your log (by clicking on the Enter button or pressing the Enter key); just entering information in the Data Entry window has no effect.

After entering one or more workouts in your log in this way, use Select By Criteria to select just the workout(s) of interest (probably using Date as the criterion for selection). Now use Save Selected As in the File menu, choose Save As Training Program, and save this workout by an appropriate name. We suggest organizing your saved workouts in a folder called Workouts in your Athletes Diary folder (or whatever folder the software is stored in). If you have a lot of saved workouts, you might create sub-folders for different sports.

Once you have saved the workouts, you can either delete the entries from your log, or modify the entry (click and hold the mouse button on the entry in the Daily Log or Calendar windows, then select Modify from the pop-up menu which appears) to finish entering all the information (e.g., the time and comment) for that workout.

You can recall saved workouts and enter them in your log from either the Data Entry window or the Week-at-a-Glance (Calendar) window. In the Data Entry window, click (and hold) the mouse on the Route/Workout pop-up menu, and your list of memorized workouts will appear; in the Week-at-a-Glance window, click (and hold) the mouse on a blank area on the day on which you want to enter the workout (or the first day if the saved workout file contains more than one day of workouts). At the bottom of the pop-up menu which appears youll see Use Saved Workout(s) If you drag the mouse down to this item and release the mouse button, a dialog box will appear and give you an opportunity to select a workout file.

There is a major difference between entering saved workouts in the Data Entry and Week-at-a-Glance windows. In the Data Entry window, only the first workout is recalled, even if the saved workout file contains more than one workout. In the Week-at-a-Glance window, all the workouts in the file are recalled and entered.

The folder Workouts that is included on our disk shows you examples of the kind of saved workouts you can create. Read the file Workout Info in the Workouts folder to learn about the workouts we have included as samples.

Using a Training Plan from Disk

The Athletes Diary can also use training plans which are already prepared on disk. To The Athletes Diary, a training plan is similar to a log, but the entries are given relative dates instead of actual dates. That is, the last date of the training plan (usually the day of the race on which the plan culminates) is given a date of 0, the previous date is called -1, and so on.

To use a training plan, first open your own log (or start a new one). Now use Merge in the File menu and select a training plan. The software recognizes that the file you are attempting to merge is a training plan, and asks you for the date of the race for which you are training (the last entry in the training plan is assumed to be the race; if this is not the case, just enter the date you want the training plan to end, rather than a race day). Enter the date, and the training plan will be merged into your log, ending on the day of the race.

If the training plan is, say, 112 days long, and the race is only 100 days away, somethings got to give! If the software detects such a situation, it will give you three choices forget the whole thing, read in only the last 100 days of the training plan, or read in the whole training plan (even though you've already missed the first 12 days). Select one of these choices.

Creating Your Own Training Plan

You can create your own training plans in two ways. First, lets say you thought you did just the right thing in preparing for last falls marathon, and you want to reproduce the last 12 weeks of training exactly. Open the log containing the relevant training, and use Select By Criteria to select out the 12 weeks (or whatever) prior to and including the race. Now choose Save Selected As from the File menu, and select the choice which reads Save as Training Program. Now you can open this years log, and merge in that training plan as described above. Of course, as you do the training youll be modifying each entry to reflect your actual training.

The second way to create your own training plan is from scratch. Lets say you read a magazine article entitled 60 days to your first century (100-mile bike ride) and want to do that. Start a new log, and just enter those 60 days of training, starting the first entry on any day you like (it wont matter at all). Some published training plans of this type will include only a distance for each days workout. Others will include only a time. Some may include both. All of these methods are perfectly acceptable to the software. Now, once you have the training entered, use Save Selected As and choose Save as Training Program. Now open your real log, use Merge to read in the training plan, and tell the computer what day youll be doing your century (or marathon or 10K or whatever), and youll be all set. All thats left is to do the training!