I’m looking for an app or website similar to SmashRun, but for cycling. And really, all I’m looking for is the annual mileage goal function. If you’re familiar with SmashRun, you’ll know how awesome their mileage tracking is. If not, it has a visual graph of the goal and my yearly progression, as well as miles ahead/behind, mi/day needed for the goal, mi/day needed based on what I’ve completed, how many days off I can take and stay on track, and how many miles I need to get back on track by a certain date.
Elevate for Strava has a nice graph for yearly progression, but it’s missing all of the other data. Any ideas?
Do you really want to invest time into goal setting and tracking of mileage?
For recreational cyclists, metrics including mileage, vertical feet climbed and days or hours per week on the bike are good goals/motivators. However, with the price drop/broad availability of the power meter as a measuring tool and structured training having gone mainstream over the past few years, most performance athletes fully understand and appreciate how of how such prior metrics are not good indicators of effort.
They don’t tell the full story, but good metrics for work put in by performance-focused cyclists are weekly and annual TSS and Time-in-Zone (TiZ), a measure of how many hours you are spending in each of the training zones you are targeting. And, of course, results are measured using FTP, points on your power-duration curve (and other metrics derived from it) and results from the events/races you participate in.
Yea, TR has that already though, so I have it and use it. I’m just looking for a cool graph that’s interesting to look at. More so icing on the cake than anything training related.
It is a slippery slope. If your thinking is just passive monitoring (as contrasted to goal setting), then it should have no impact on your performance. However if you use if for goal setting, as you get closer to “your mileage goal”, it could lead you to make a sub-optimal decisions regarding what you do on your bike OR feeling badly about such decisions that may be better for your performance.
Of course, you can do anything you choose and undoubtedly you’ll get some good suggestions in this post if that is the path you want to choose. I’m just trying to highlight the downside of setting goals around metrics that may be counterproductive.