How to Log Your Runs
Column C of the spreadsheet is where you can write your own daily mileage. One way to do it is to go down column B until you find the date, then over to column C and simply type in the number of miles you ran that day. Simple. If you do this for every run, you'll build a very nice log file and be able to track your progress.
A more sophisticated way to enter your run distance is to enter the name of the distance you ran, rather than the number of miles. In the first worksheet of the workbook, the one named "Distance," are a number of commonly used distances and short names for them. These distances are in Central Park in New York City, to serve as a useful (to a few people) example. If you ran once around Central Park today you would find today's date in column B, arrow to column C, and type
=bigloop
When you finish editing the cell, Excel will display
6.0273
If you ran once around the big loop and once around the middle, 4-mile, loop, you could enter
=bigloop+middle4loop
and Excel would calculate
10.0712
There are several advantages of logging the distances by name rather than by value. First, it's more fun (isn't it more fun to write =bigloop than 6.0273?) More importantly, it keeps you from having to change a lot of information later. Perhaps you run from home to the library and back as one of your regular runs. You've estimated that it's 4 miles, but you don't really know. If you log it as 4 miles on ten different days and then find out the distance is really 4.6 miles, you either have to keep the discrepancy in the log file (that's 6 miles you didn't give yourself credit for) or you have to go back and sort out all those entries (that's 25 minutes you could be running).
What to do with Your Information
Once you have entered a few runs, you can look at the row for Sunday at the end of that week. So, if you've entered runs for the week of June 2, 2003, look at the row for June 8. You can enter your miles there in column C as usual. In column E all of the miles for that week have been added up. If you continue across, you'll see the weekly totals for the four training programs mentioned above. You can mentally compare your total with the total for the schedule you want to follow.
If you prefer to compare your weekly mileage with that of the schedule another way, you can go to the last sheet of the workbook, "Week Distance Chart." This presents a line graph of the four training programs, your weekly total, and your weekly total plus cross-training.
