I’ve recently started adding some information into ride notes after workouts.
I’ve come up with a system that is easy and repeatable for me, and fairly easy to understand at a quick glance.
My system has 5 categories:
Sleep (8 hours)
Nutrition (only smoothie pre-ride, could have had more)
Hydration
P. health
M. health
When making notes about the categories I use emojis to identify what happened throughout the day.
= good, completed, proper preparation = needs attention, need to make changes for future workouts = bad, failed to prepare, needs immediate attention
I also make small notes within the categories, or make general notes about the workout. The general notes about the workout could be about the optional drills, or mental and physical feelings throughout the workout.
I made an Annotation on my calendar called *** NOTES ***, that I open, copy and paste into my rides. Similar to yours, so I can easily get similar formatting with less typing, and try to give similar info for tracking. I try to do it for all the mid to hard effort workouts. I sometimes skip the easy rides, unless there is something notable about them.
I love ride notes! I mostly record the same or similar info as y’all but with less formatting.
One thing I always try to add, if relevant, is if I think I could do another interval or if I should scale up / down the workout next time around. So something like “definitely could add another set”, “scale up to +2 next time”, or “no way I could have gone longer”. This gives me a little info on what to do next time around and ads context beyond something like “felt great” or “fully cooked”.
I have a loose template-ish that emerged after a while:
[how I’m feeeeeeling]
RPE: [made up numbers to help me get better at made up numbers]
Fuel: [what I ate and drank, before and during]
Sleep: [hours and/or quality]
Cycle: [which day of]
In addition to rides, I always make a note if I skip a scheduled workout or make a major modification (shorten, substitute something or move it to a new day). I use TraingPeaks which color codes compliance. As go back to previous years its the red (incomplete or failed) workouts I seem to be the most interested in! And while you think you’d never forget why you skipped a workout, a year later I never remember. So I always fess up.
Only started after hearing the podcast. I’m just putting in how I found it, any other circumstances for future reference (e.g. I did consecutive days hard workouts this week), and then my fuelling.
Reviving this thread rather than starting a new one.
Does anyone know how to view notes quickly across several rides? I just started putting notes in and I know I’m going to want to review my notes over several weeks, especially if I’m feeling particularly well, to look for commone themes or attributes that led up those sensations. Otherwise, what’s the benefit of notes? Current functionality, as far as I’m aware, requires opening each ride and scrolling to the bottom to see my notes. I would love to know if there is a better way to view notes over several rides in easier form.
From there you see the most recent workout to the older ones below. Any workout with notes are shown in full right there. Good or bad, these appear in a condensed format without hard line returns, even if those are present in you main workout page.
If you want to refine the list, you can use the filters at the top, or even use search to find workouts by name or anything listed in the workout notes.
I add notes after every ride, to every single ride, easy or hard.
I don’t have a rigid format - it depends on the ride. Sometimes I’ll compare the ride to the last time I did that workout, or to the last workout of that type. I definitely try to justify how I felt - hard workouts after an interrupted nights sleep, or easy workouts might be due to good fuelling, good cooling, and a great night.
When I look forward at upcoming workouts, I often check how other people have performed on that workout. I really wish more people would include ride notes!
(8 hours)
(only smoothie pre-ride, could have had more)
= bad, failed to prepare, needs immediate attention