The Magic of Analog, Part One
I did something I haven’t done in years yesterday: I purchased a pen-and-paper planner for 2021. No, I’m not staging a digital rebellion (at least not a complete one): I couldn’t live without Google Calendar at this point. The reason I did it is because I want to feel a little more connected with my training. 2020 has been a hard year, with little to aim for in terms of events, and most training has had the same dusty taste that “virtue is its own reward” carries. Most of us have dutifully soldiered on with our work, knowing that events will return at some point, and we should maintain the fitness we’ve spent years building, yadda yadda yadda…
It’s late October, and I am fed up with virtue. I have been luckier than most, and have been able to toe the line a few times this year: the American Birkebeiner in February, and then Bear Lake Brawl in September and Belgian Waffle Ride Cedar City in October. But all of them, other than the Birkie (which took place a scant three weeks before everything really shut down for the the year), have savored of “at least I just get to do something!” instead of the feeling that most athletes search for, which is “I feel sharp and ready to perform at my best.” Yes, we are lucky to get to do these events, but if participation was good enough for the people reading and writing this blog, we probably wouldn’t be reading and writing this blog. As athletes, we really do hunger for improvement, and then the chance to put that improvement on the line.
Where is all this going, and what does a planner have to do with it? Well, I start my season-end break on Monday, after another virtual half-marathon. I plan to take ten glorious days off of all training, and then begin to ease back in to a winter of cross-country ski preparation. The Birkie is tentatively on in a slightly shortened format, and I plan to be ready on February 27th to ski my face off. The planner is part of that plan. By this point in my training life, I do my workouts and then my watch or my bike computer magically whisks them away to the cloud, where they people my TrainingPeaks account, turning workouts green (or orange or yellow or red). I don’t have to do anything, the result of which is that I’m completely alienated from my reflecting upon my workouts—my relationship with them has become another victim of the convenience economy.
I’ve noticed, over the years, that a few of the athletes I’ve had the privilege of training with keep detailed written journals of their workouts, color-coding them and noting how they felt in each session. “You can call it workout logging,” says Linsey Corbin, “But really it’s just scrapbooking.” Whatever you call it, I’ve noticed a clear correlation between athlete that take the time to reflect on their sessions and the degree of their achievement. I believe (and this is just a hypothesis) that by taking the time to write down their workouts, they connect themselves more deeply to the experience, teaching themselves what certain intensities feel like, until they become very fine sensory organs. That delicate control becomes an asset to them on race day, as they intuitively know how hard or how easy to go at different moments of the race.
To some degree, I’ve developed this kind of feel myself, mostly due to simply doing the sport for a long time, but that’s the nice thing about picking up a newish sport—you get a chance to be all excited about your training all over again, and the desire to engage with it is fresh and new. So yeah, I’m trading on the enthusiasm of nordic skiing in order to jumpstart my enthusiasm about endurance training in general, but I think that’s a fairly normal thing to do for endurance athletes.
Why do we think this is a good thing for you, even if you’re not picking up a new sport? We see athletes mindlessly logging workouts all the time, foregoing workout comments, and trudging towards events as if their training is a conveyance to a better place. The training is the better place, and every way you can acknowledge that, luxuriate in it, and spend time with it you’ll make everything you do in endurance sports better. Give it a shot. We’re going to be writing a series on this subject (training by feel), and we hope you join us for all of them.