You may seek ways to maximize results and optimize your efforts as a runner. Whether you’re just starting or an elite athlete, a running journal can be a helpful tool. They can help you stay motivated, track your progress, identify areas for improvement, reflect on your journey, and celebrate your success.
What Is a Running Journal?
A running journal is a record of your running activities. It includes details about your workouts, races, goals, and progress. It can be a physical notebook, a digital file like a spreadsheet, or an app you use to track your running.
Running journals can track a variety of details. For example:
- Total Distance
- Time
- Pace
- Elevation gain
- Location or Route
- Weather conditions
- Your Feelings and Reflections
- Goals
Generally, the more details you keep, the better decisions you can make. Some details are more difficult to measure without tools like a fitness tracker. However, it is not necessary to use one.
Benefits of a Running Journal
By recording your distance, pace, and other important metrics, you can identify patterns, track improvements, and set realistic goals for yourself. Moreover, there are other benefits than just knowing how far and how much time you spend running. Let’s look at some of the benefits of keeping a running journal.
Help Set Realistic Goals
At first, goals tend to be very broad and poorly thought through. For example, you may aim to lose weight, get more organized, or start exercising. However, there isn’t anything specific or measurable with those goals. What does success look like?
Fortunately, you can set realistic goals if you take the time to think them through. In fact, your running journal is your tool to help you reach your goals. Also, it can help you reflect on your goals and give you insight to update them accordingly. It’s perfectly fine to redefine a goal when more information is available.
Track Your Progress
A running journal can help you track your progress over time to show you all your workouts in one place. You can also visualize your incremental improvements and set expectations moving forward. Also, you can see how close you are to your goals and determine if you need to change them.
Motivation
Without a running journal, it’s easy to forget all the days that you went for a run. In time, your routine may feel repetitive and boring. On the other hand, seeing your progress can be a great motivator to keep running through the good times and rough spots.
You Can Reflect On Your Journey
A running journal can be a great way to reflect on all your workouts. You’ll have a complete history of where you started and how far you’ve come. You can see your progress, improvements, and setbacks with this much detail. In fact, you may be able to pinpoint why you had setbacks and what you did to set yourself up for success. Furthermore, your thoughts can help you determine what may work best for your future goals.
Tips For Keeping Your Running Journal
Your running journal is personal. If you want, you can include pictures, articles, or something else. It’s up to you! Ultimately, the more personalized your running journal, the better it will be. However, you may not know where to begin. So, here are some tips to get you started.
Keep Track Of Your Goals
Your journal should have your goals somewhere you can easily see them. At first, you may not know what your goals are. If that’s the case, ask yourself why you are running, what you hope to accomplish, and how long or how far you want to run.
It’s ok if you don’t know those answers. However, a benefit of your journal is it will help you answer those questions as you progress through your journey. As a result of your efforts, your running journal will help you adjust your goals so they are specific, measurable, and attainable. Don’t be afraid to change your goals as more information becomes available.
Determine What You Want to Track
You may not know what you should track to help you achieve your running goals. If you don’t know where to start, then use these suggestions:
- Distance – How far did you run?
- Location – Where did you run?
- Pace – Your running pace per mile or kilometer
- Time – How long did you run?
Ideally, you should also track other details such as:
- Average and max heart rate
- Mood
- Sleep
- Thoughts and reflections
- Weather
Fortunately, you only need to track the basics in your running journal. However, the more data you keep, the better. Thankfully, you can easily do this with a fitness tracker. Most of them make it easy to gather a lot of metrics. In fact, FitTrend works with many fitness trackers to make keeping your journal easy.
Don’t worry if you don’t track everything when you first start your running journal. It’s perfectly ok to start tracking more data while you’re on your journey. This method lets you determine what information is vital to help achieve your running goals.
Keep Track of Your Thoughts
There is more to your running journal than tracking details like distance, time, and where you run. In fact, keeping track of how you feel after a workout, both mentally and physically, is important.
As a result, you may start to see patterns. For example, changes in your workouts, sleep, diet, or something else could affect your running. If you’re keeping track of your thoughts, then it can help you make better decisions to reach your goals more quickly or even prevent injuries.
Look At Your Running Journal Everyday
Take a few minutes to review your journal daily, even if you don’t run that day. The more you review and update your journal, the more you will learn about yourself. This will make it easier to identify how you feel after workouts, pick up clues that can help you make adjustments, or allow you to predict when you’re overtraining, starting to get injured, or sick.
Also, it’s an opportunity to see how far you’ve come, how much progress you’ve made, and to know if you’re still in line with your goals. Furthermore, it’s an excellent time to strategize and make adjustments. After all, the purpose of your running journal is to keep you on track and help you reach your goals.
The Takeaway
If you’re a runner, you should keep a running journal. It’s a great way to stay motivated, track your progress, and identify areas for improvement. The more you personalize your running journal, the more valuable it will be.
Start by listing your goals, no matter how broad they may be. As you progress, you can use your journal to make your goals more specific, measurable, and attainable. In time, you may decide to add more details to your journal.
Lastly, make sure to look at your journal every day and reflect on your efforts. Doing so will enable you to review your progress, determine what’s working and may need adjustments, and keep you motivated as you work towards your goals.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
