Sport Tracks, Strava and Trainer Road

Sport Tracks

If you want to record and analyse your bicycle rides or runs, you'll need some sort of GPS enabled device. I have a Garmin Forerunner. After my ride I can upload this to my PC and analyse the data using Sport Tracks.

Here is my last ride up a local hill called Fyrish. Whilst out on the trail you can hit the lap button, but you can also add the lap positions using SportTracks. I also have a record of my heart rate and what zones my heart rate was in throughout. This particular ride has some tough parts which would have been spent in Zone 4 and 5.

Here's the profile of the ride which also shows the grade in percent and my heart rate.

There's also a section where you can generate reports and charts of your rides. Here's a nice one showing what heart rate zones I spent my time in during 2013.

You can also get plugins which extend the useability into whatever analyses you want. One I have discovered recently is training load. A wonderful visual interpretation of your training. This extra plugin is $12.

What you get here is basically, Blue = Fitness Red = Fatigue Green = the balance between the two. The orange spikes are my workouts and cycles. You can see how my fitness has progressed since September and my week off at Christmas time.

The full version of Sport Tracks is now $35, it was cheaper many years ago. There is no subscription just a one off payment.

Strava

You can also upload your rides to Strava. They have a bot that will automatically highlight an interesting part of your ride and make it into a segment. This could be a hill. Anyone else who rides that hill will be added to the leaderboard.

The good thing is, you can also make your own segments so if they missed your favorite offroad hill climb or downhill you can just add it yourself.

Here is Strava's representation of the same ride I showed in sporttracks.

You can see the list of all the segments I covered on the ride.

This is the Car Park To Monument segment. It's the biggest hill climb on the ride.

Strava can also provide more in depth analyses based on your power meter reading and heart rate but you have to pay for them and there not as good as the the Sport Tracks tools. 

Trainer Road

This is my latest discovery and a real help if you struggle with the boredom of indoor Turbo sessions.

For six dollars a month you get structured sigle workouts or whole workout plans lasting several weeks, you can even make your own workouts and add in video workouts from the likes of Sufferfest !

Set the bike on the trainer, plug in your ANT+ dongle pick a workout and away you go.

The plans are based on your personal LTHR or FTP, this is basically the amount of power you are capable of delivering over a period of time. If you don't know it, then sit there fitness test, The Rubber Glove.

From that moment forward ALL your workouts will be derived from your FTP. Power readings can be taken from your chosen power meter or derived from virtualPower, that is related to the speed of your Turbo Trainer. This is very dependent on your turbo set up and tyre pressure, consistency is the key.

Heres a quick view of some of my workouts whilst following a program based around threshold power.

Whilst training you can have Netflix or Youtube running on screen. Or you can choose a Sufferfest video to ride along with. They have one for rubberglove. The videos are perfectly synced and start when you start pedaling.

All of the above tools help me to stay motivated and when I'm not out or on the Turbo Trainer I can spend hours analysing my rides :)