Archive for January 11th, 2008

OK, so I mildly regret saying I’d post my workout sheets in the last post, not because I’m afraid of revealing my spreadsheet mania, but because I must attempt to explain this in the most non-boringest way possible. I’m not sure if it can be done.

Anyway, I’ve made one big “Running” Excel spreadsheet that houses each of the sheets I’m about to show you, plus this nifty Daniels Training Tables sheet (which I highly recommend downloading…it has many cool features).

If you must know, this spreadsheet has become such a wonderful training tool and motivator that I print hard copies of the Race Pace and Training Pace pages below, so I can admire their numeric beauty even when away from my computer. The better to think my way faster, lol.

Starting with my planning calendar: this is a free Excel calendar template I downloaded from the Microsoft site and tweaked for my nefarious purposes. I added a column to the right that adds the daily mileage for the week on the fly, so I can play around with adding, moving and subtracting mileage and get instant feedback. I fill it out a week in advance and during the week I’ll switch stuff around depending on the weather or how I’m feeling, so my planning is always fluid. I also added note sections above the days so I can enter the proposed workout as well.

What you don’t see are two more columns to the right that were very useful as I built my mileage, but not too much anymore. One of the columns takes the weekly total and automatically adds 10%, the other column adds 15%. Together, they gave me a great way to figure out the next week’s mileage goal, depending on how aggressive I wanted to be.

The next sheet is my McMillan race-pace compilation sheet (sorry, I cut it in half so you could see the whole page length). It’s composed of McMillan calculator race times based on 5Ks, diminishing in 15 second increments. Look on the top right and see my equivalent 5K after September’s Half was 24:16, then the next one down is 24:00, 23:45, etc.

Each sheet has 6 of these race calculations and I’m on the home stretch with this current one, just one or two sections to go! Then the next sheet starts with 22:45 and culminates in 21:30 (gulp), which I would jump for joy to make by the end of 2008. But I digress…

The point of this sheet is to be able to see the progression I’m working towards on one page, visualize the paces as well as give me an easy reference and comparison as I improve. Also, when I’m getting ready for a race, I can look at, say, three of those sections and figure out a “best” goal, “would be happy with” goal and “if worse comes to worse” goal.

The third sheet is my McMillan training pace compilation. In conjunction with the sheet above, this one has 6 blocks per page based on the same race times, but I’m only showing the bottom 4 blocks to keep file-size down.

The first bit in white has 5K, Half and Marathon times and their respective paces in brackets. The part in blue starts with the corresponding McMillan pace ranges (eg. “9:10 to 10:10”). Next to each of these ranges is the average of that range, the better to see where I actually am in SmartCoach as I improve (which only has one pace listed for each workout, not the fabulous span of times McMillan gives us).

And below the McMillan’s pace ranges are the interval times which again, help me keep tabs on the single paces SmartCoach spouts and shows me what to expect next.

I hope all that didn’t sound like gobbledygook to you guys – it was a lot harder explaining the sheets than making them. I swear, this is about the 15th 16th edit. I’m done now.

And that’s your crazy cool peek into my spreadsheet drawers. I can only hope it makes you as hot as it does me .