Love Thy Training Journal
My training journal from the fall of 2002 when I was entering my senior year in college.
When a major event in history takes place, it can make profound impressions and long lasting memories for those that live through it. You will often hear the question “where were you when” one of these events took place. Author and psychologist, Morton Hunt, states that “recollections of such experiences as first hearing about the assassination of President Kennedy or the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle are known to psychologists as ‘flashbulb memories,’ because they are vivid tableaus that seem utterly unforgettable.” Essentially, these moments are so profound and so impactful that we remember them more clearly and concisely than many other of our life experiences.
Or do we?
Two researchers, Neiser and Harsch, conducted a study when the Challenger explosion occurred in 1986. They interviewed a number of people a day after the explosion and got their first hand testimony of where they were and what they were doing when it happened. Neiser and Harsch later followed up with all these interviewees 2.5 years later and when they were asked to recall where they were and what they were doing when the Challenger exploded more than a third of the participants gave completely different and incorrect answers than what they had said in 1986. Despite the event being one of the most impactful moments of their lives, many people did not remember their experience accurately at all.
In 1991, two researchers, Van Yperen and Buunk, coined the term “illusory superiority” which basically describes when we overestimate our abilities. One study that is repeatedly used to highlight this idea was conducted in Sweden in 1981 by Svenson. Students in the United States were asked to assess their own driving abilities and 93% claimed to be of above average skill and 88% claimed to be of above average safety. Now, I realize statistics can have largely skewed averages by outliers, but I would say that a 93% self-assessment of having above average skill means that many of us can be prone to thinking at least somewhat highly of our own abilities.
I bring up these ideas to underscore the need to stay on top of your training journals for two reasons:
Even the biggest events can potentially fade from accuracy in our own memories.
We probably think our memories are better than they actually are.
Which brings us to the everlasting power of the training journal and the athlete’s engagement. In this day and age, we have data that gets quickly and automatically uploaded to our various online training journals which is great for objectivity, but horrible for subjectivity. To use the Challenger analogy, anyone can look up a video or read about the event and get accurate information, but they cannot know what someone was doing/thinking/feeling when it occurred if that wasn’t also written down.
More often than not, I have seen workouts get uploaded with less and less reflective note taking occurring, both for training and for races. While I understand it might feel like a lot of extra work, I highly recommend taking the time to write down pertinent details about those events in your journal because almost all of us will forget them without it. Most workouts and races will not be profoundly impactful like historical events and if we can fail to accurately recall what happened to us on those days we definitely aren’t going to remember how we felt on a standard long run on April 17th, 2013.
So here we go:
Do the training.
Upload the data.
Write your journal entry on the same day as the workout (races can be done later in the week, if needed).
Repeat over and over and over again.
Finally, when addressing the question of what to include in a journal entry, I always advise athletes to include more than they think they need. I personally like to include details like how I felt, the weather, the routes I chose (if relevant) and then I give context to the data (maybe a tailwind led to lower power on one rep or another had stop signs, etc.). If I go to something like a masters swim session, I write down all the details of the session that had structure including all warm up sets, pre-sets, and main sets as necessary. You and/or your coach will never regret having too many details, but having too little, too often will leave you all with less to look back and learn from down the road.
A training journal entry for a swim I did almost 20 years ago.
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References:
Hunt, Morton. The Story of Psychology. New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of "flashbulb" memories (pp. 9–31). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511664069.003
Svenson. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica. 47 (2): 143–148. http://heatherlench.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/svenson.pdf