crunching the numbers

i'm more of a process over product kind of person.

journey over destination.

quality over quantity.

people over project.

which is all kind of funny when i think about how preoccupied i am with tracking my training data.

with so many options out there, my favourite tool for keeping tabs on my weekly mileage is dailymile (you can see the dailymile widget on the left-hand side column on my blog).  i suppose that it's because it's a combination tracking site and social media platform, including the option to link up with friends/acquaintances and post comments, encouragements and other notes.  it provides me with just what i need in terms of at-a-glance data:  distances for specific workouts, for a week or month at a time - even what some of my colleagues are managing to pump out on a weekly basis.  

this may or may not be a preferred performance tracking and analysis tool for runners, but many of the athletes that i follow on twitter and facebook have a profile on dailymile.

many others have taken to sites like strava or runkeeper, and to a lesser degree training peaks and sporttracks.  again, there are all sorts of alternatives available, and many times i've found individuals to be fiercely loyal to their webpage of choice.

since i use my garmin 305 to record my run data, my first digital stop is normally at the garmin connect website.  so imagine my intrigue when i was reading alessandro santuz's blog and found out about tapiriik, an open-source platform for synching multiple performance tracking service streams.

what's great about this is obviously the concept of synching - one touch consolidation of information across multiple software applications.  instead of being daunted and/or bogged down by the work of logging into various profiles and inputting information separately into each one, tapiriik offers you the ability to set-up a synching network and then subsequently making your training and racing stats available in each one.  

the one notable feature of tapiriik that is especially enticing is the ability to synch to dropbox, a virtual (shared) hard drive.  while i'm still working at configuring this so that it works optimally for me, i relish the thought of being able to have a downloadable capture of my training info for my records.

which tracking service have you sworn allegiance to, if any?  do you think that a tool like tapiriik might be of use to you?

crunching the numbers