Why Data Tracking is so Important for Endurance Athletes

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There used to be a time that participating in endurance sports meant hopping on a bike, or stepping into a pair of running shoes, and heading into the great outdoors for adventures.  Perhaps the only metrics tracked would be duration or mileage accumulated.  Fast forward to now, and there isn’t any element of your habits and performance that cannot be tracked and monitored.  Sleep, weight, power, heart rate variability, it’s all a blizzard of data, metrics and graphs, all promising insights and answers into your progression as an athlete or enthusiast.  But is all this data helpful?  What should you ignore, and what should you track?  Let me provide a few thoughts and insights.

Table of Contents:

  1. What is your relationship with Data?

  2. What Are The Types Of Training Data For Endurance Athletes?

What is your relationship with Data?

In a discussion on the Purple Patch Podcast with Alex Hutchinson, author of Endure and performance specialist, we spent a lot of time discussing the latest trends in data.  We both agreed that integrating quantifiable data tracking can be a useful addition to your training journey, but also both voiced concerns of the limitations and pitfalls.  I encourage you to confidently retain a high sense of empowerment and ownership over your performance, never losing sight of how things feel, what your energy and mood is, and other qualitative elements of performance.  I call the feelings in performance and pacing as being your ‘inner animal’, and every great athlete will hold a strong sense if these feelings and perceptions.  Any piece of trackable data will never provide the answers to your performance questions.  Am I improving?  Am I too tired to train?  Am I giving the right effort or intensity?  You won’t find answers in the numbers.  What you will find is objective data that can be included in your matrix of observations, review and decision making.  The data is objective and important, and can help you see trends, provide insights, act as a chance to pause and reflect more globally.  If you balance your subjective analysis with the objective data collected, you have a better chance to consistently making decisions.  If you avoid looking to replace thoughts, coaching teams or inner sense of being, then data is really useful.

A great example of this would be a monitoring tool that collects insights like Heart Rate Variability  into your state of recovery, freshness and readiness to train.  Examples of these would be the Whoop Band or the Oura RingFolks often ask if these are useful, and in general the answer is that yes, they can be.  They can also be detrimental if not viewed through the correct lens.  If you wake up in the morning and ask your Whoop data to tell you if you should train hard or not, then you are on the incorrect path.  If, on the other hand, you review the data and synchronize it with how you actually feel in your body, as well as an honest reflection on your different training and life stress of the last days, then it becomes an incredibly useful tool to add into your decision making framework.  

To highlight a few quick-hits in each of the areas under the Purple Patch Pillars of Performance, let’s investigate some good options for data tracking for performance.

What Are The Types Of Training Data For Endurance Athletes?

Training Data:  Beyond a training log and journey, here are a few elements of data that you should consider tracking:

Subjective feelings:  I begin with this, as it is qualitative, but critical.  Asking yourself the daily question of how you feel and what your mood and energy is, will always be the most important step you can take for your performance decision.  Tracking these reports will help you see how your energy is correlated with different training and life-stress events.

  • Power / Pace:  We embrace utilizing GPS trackers for running, as well as power meters for riding (and running), but they shouldn’t shackle your training behavior, instead, they should amplify performance insights.  You always want to train to the intent of the session, and appreciate how the effort should feel, but the metrics provide both in-session objective display of work done, as well as post-session reflections and lessons.

  • Heart rate variability:  The most direct measure of metabolic stress, as well as a provider of insights into how your body responds to different types of training, and is adapting to the stress or the load.  Heart rate still retains value in your training journey.

Sleep Data: We care about two elements of sleep hygiene.  The first is the duration of sleep, and the second is sleep quality.  Tracking these with self-reporting is a worthwhile practice, as most people have a murky recollection on how much sleep they truly achieve each night.  A sleep monitoring app, whether on the iPhone or specific sleep app, can be useful if applied sensibly.  There are still plenty of discussion on the true accuracy of these tools and apps, as well as how easy fooling the apps into showing improving sleep is, but any data that amplifies awareness and drives you to focus on sleep as a priority, holds value for many.  The word of warning with tracking sleep is the emotional ramifications.  Most who begin to focus on sleep tracking do so as they have an awareness of compromised sleep habits.  Be careful not to commence tracking and then allow reduced or broken sleep becoming a pass/fail test.  Converting sleep into an emotional-laden part of your day will only amplify broken sleep and ramp up stress associated with it. 

Nutrition Data: The majority of folks do not need to track eating habits obsessively, but writing down and logging consumed calories for a set period of time can provide plenty of really insightful and objective insights into what you are putting into your body.  It will help you make good decision with your nutrition in the future. Many folks don’t have honest insights into their own eating habits, so tracking every consumption for a few weeks can provide some real aha movements.  Again, these are only useful if the insights gained lead to actionable changes in behavior, so be ready to refine habits based on what you observe and track.  

There is seldom value or need to track at a consistent level, and most people thrive by implementing habit-based broader approaches, instead of engineering your way into tracking every calorie your consume.

Recovery Data.  There is some real credence and value in monitoring Heart Rate Variability (HRV), if you are able to be consistent, and confident enough to apply any drawn data and lessons into your broader matrix of observations and lessons.  I wouldn’t argue that tracking Heart Rate Variability is an essential athletic addition, but those who enjoy data and tracking can certainly gleam insights.  In opposition to this, the current technology doesn’t support any meaningful value from the recovery status and scores that you pull from devises such as a Garmin or Polar GPS watches.  Don’t get fooled or obsessed into making decisions based on your recovery scores these devises offer. While the concept is cute, I haven’t observed any useful insights from these scores.

As we think about data, I think you see that it is clear that anything tracked is only useful to you if you can adapt or shift your approach or behavior from the insights and metrics.  In addition, it is clear that no data will be the well of truth when making final decisions or reflects in success or readiness to train.  They say the data lies, but in performance journey decisions, your own insights and feelings are equal or more valuable than any piece of data you collect.  Keep it simple, retain pragmatisms, and only view metrics as supporting insights.

I hope that helps.

PPF