3 things you shouldn’t run without, part I

Some runners love gadgets like the latest-and-greatest GPS-enabled sport watch, while others tend to go minimalist right down to their funky Five Fingers footwear. Still others love to geek out with the latest and greatest mapping tool or phone app.

I’ve been on a few missions recently. The first, to find an online tool that would let me create my own training calendar and log workouts against it. The second mission, and maybe more importantly, was to find a new sport wash that would work in my fancy new HE laundry team to rid my gear of the less-than-ladylike, odorific “parfum de running” that funkified my stuff.

Lastly (but definitely not leastly), locate an anti-blister/anti-chafe product that would last for the long haul. Oh summer, why dost thou hate me so and chafeth my delicate nethers? *Sigh*

In the interest of keeping the posts to bite-sized, quickly consumable bits similar to the Protein Bites or ShotBloks we scarf down during our runs, I’ve broken my findings into 3 parts. Lord knows there’s a ton more, but this will get the party started.

First mission – Training Calendar
Naturally, I checked out TrainingPeaks.com, MapMyRun.com, and a few others. I could upload a training plan alright, but it had to be one from their selection of plans. And for a price, of course.

I’m not dissing TrainingPeaks.com (TP) and MapMyRun.com (MMR) – they’re great tools. Tracking nutrition and overall analysis with TP is pretty good, even if it’s a bit of a chore to find some food items for us Canucks. And mapping routes with MMR is awesome – no more running around the neighbourhood trying to figure out how you’re going to make up that last 3 km. Finding what I was looking for became a huge challenge.

Enter the all-knowing Google and a random search (I don’t even remember what terms I used), et voilà! RunningAhead.com entered my life.

No, RunningAhead.com doesn’t have the helpful reminder emails about what your next training day brings like TP, but TP doesn’t either unless you sign up for a paid account. Call me cheap, but as a ‘regular Jane’ runner, I just can’t justify TP’s monthly fees.

RunningAhead.com (RA) lets you create your own training calendar with easy-peasy drag & drop functionality, and customize to your heart’s content. It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly how it was supposed to work, since I didn’t find it to be the most intuitive program, but once I figured it out I had my training calendar created for 16 weeks in about 10 minutes.

The awesomesauce here is that you can upload past workouts to RA from your GPS. True, they upload from a file and go into your calendar as ‘default’ runs, but in a couple of mouse clicks you’ve got your history and you’re ready to move forward. Upload your new workouts as often as you wish, and see them graphed nicely on the summary page.

I’m still playing around with RunningAhead and have only scratched the surface of what can be done with it. RA also has a built-in mapping tool, calculators, an online community so you can share routes and thoughts with other runners, and more.

The best part? It’s absolutely free! The small catch are the ads (of course), which you can get rid of for a measley $10/month, plus add a small donation if you wish.

Got a calendar/training app you swear by? Share it with us – it’s always nice to find stuff that makes our lives just a little easier!

Tagged as: Apparel, diet tips, healthy gurlz, hot weather running, Just plain fun, marathon training, Race Prep, Random stuff, road running, running safety, training