What I Want From an Online Training and Activity Tracking Tool

Someone in our local Facebook running group recently asked members to complete a survey on how they track, record and share their running. This got me thinking about what sites and service I currently use and what features would be required for me to swap them all for a single unifying solution.

Primary Tools and Services

First off, it's worth looking at what I currently use and what features are good and lacking in each service. My current activity tracking and training platform consists of four fairly disjointed websites and services:

Movescount

I use a Suunto Ambit3 multi-sport watch to track all my activities. It's a superb watch (I'll add a separate review later) and it synchronises to Suunto's proprietary Movescount site and app. Movescount is essential in the mix as you need it to get data off the watch, configure activities and update the settings on the watch. Additionally it has a pretty neat app designer for building your own watch apps (as a software engineer this is something I'm using quite a lot).

Also, it has a reasonable training planner feature that syncs with the Ambit3 so you can always find out what your workouts for the day should be without needing to be near a computer or mobile. Unfortunately this planner isn't the easiest to use for actually building a plan and it doesn't work particularly well as a training diary, so I also have to maintain this data elsewhere as well and keep the two in sync manually.

Analysis of activity data is fairly rudimentary, probably just the minimum subset of features you can get away with. There's fairly good data about individual activities, but there's no way to track trends across multiple activities or periods. Fortunately the Movescount site can be configured to automatically export to Strava and TrainingPeaks, and you can also download .fit or .gpx files for manual import into other sites.

The community aspects of Movescount are quite limited, mainly because it's comprised only of Suunto owners.

Strava

I switched over from Runkeeper to Strava about 18 months ago. It's one of the two sites that I actually pay to use the premium services. Most of my individual activity analysis is done on Strava and this is also the place that I use to track shoe usage figures and to plan routes. I like the features that they have for analysing running and bike data. However, as a triathlete, I wish they did a better job on swim analysis.

The recent expansion to start tracking trends across similar runs/rides is nice, but this functionality is still very lacking in it's scope. You can't use it for any serious performance over time analysis as it appears to be only based on following the same identical routes each time, which gets rather boring.

I like the Strava training log and calendar feature, but not being able to use it as a training planner is a real weakness in my mind. Also, Strava doesn't really function that well as a training diary as you can only attach limited information to individual activities and there's no real publishing/sharing mechanism.

However, the biggest value I get from Strava, beyond the activity tracking, is the community aspect. Being able to join clubs, link to races and follow other athletes is great. I've been able to meet some great people and share in experiences and discussions. Being able to send and receive kudos and comment on activities just makes at all a bit more special. After doing a particularly awesome but tough session or race, getting some virtual high-fives is a really nice feeling.

TrainingPeaks

I've been looking for a good training planner/diary tool for a long, long time. I even started writing my own at one point (but work got in the way of finishing it!). First I came across XHale (see below) but it's limited feature set and manual event import weren't working for me. Then I decided to experiment with TrainingPeaks and I've been using it happily for a few weeks. This is the other tool that I now actually pay for the Premium Edition.

The main feature that I use within TrainingPeaks is the Calendar functionality. I use it as an additional activity tracker (in addition to Strava), with activities being automatically synchronised from Movescount. I also use the Calendar functionality to build my future training plans. It's a great plan builder and has good support for libraries of workouts and moving activities around. The ability to expose the Calendar as an iCal feed and also work with it in the dedicated TrainingPeaks iOS app are really useful as well.

In addition to using the Calendar to plan and record workouts, it also acts are a reasonably good training diary. You can record pre and post-activity notes and details of how the session went. There's also pretty good support for adding metrics like sleep, weight, mood, motivation, steps and so on into the Calendar.

Probably the only major features that seem to be missing from the Calendar are the ability to record notes and goals against weeks or training meso-cycles as opposed to individual activities (I think the classic view supports this to some extent, but it's not yet present on the new view) and the ability to publish a summary of my training diary to a blog. It would also be really nice if the TrainingPeaks app was HealthKit integrated so that it could automatically populate metrics into the calendar from the other apps that I use to capture this info already (SleepCycle, Nudge, MyFitnessPal, manually entered weight etc.)

The other parts of TrainingPeaks that I make good use of are its ability to define Annual Training Plans (which help with training plan building) and the Dashboard. On the Dashboard, the Performance Manager is by far the best component in terms of assessing ongoing levels of training load and stress in order to get the right balance between training enough to get improvements versus over-training. Being able to add custom charts and graphs to the visiualisation on the Dashboard is also a great feature.

Blogger

I maintain two blogs, one about software development and another about running and triathlon (this one in fact!). I do these via the free Blogger platform, mainly because I can't be bothered with the hassle of administering anything myself! My blog entries tend to be just observations, thoughts or reviews.

I don't record a training diary on my blog mainly because, again, I can't be bothered with all the pain of exporting and duplicating the information from Strava/TrainingPeaks into yet another location. I make do with the minimalist Strava activity summary and activity feed blog widgets.

Other Tools and Services

There are some other tools and services that complete my platform or that I found useful but stopped using for one reason or another.

Facebook

Unfortunately I can't avoid Facebook as most of my friends and family are on there. I usually share major runs or important races from Strava on to Facebook so that all my non-running contacts can see what I've achieved.

Twitter

I don't normally tweet all my runs as I find that frustrating when other people clog up my feed with that level of noise. I do tend to announce any new blog posts that I write via a Twitter post as I know a good proportion of my followers will find them of interest.

XHale

A few months ago I started using Xhale as my training planner and diary. It's pretty good for a free tool. Unfortunately it has very minimal ability for analysis, limited import functionality (I was exporting .fit files from Movescount and manually uploading them) and it also doesn't provide any way to export or expose the training diary. These are the main reasons I swapped to TrainingPeaks. It also doesn't provide any way to publish the training diary to a blog. It does what it does well, but it's yet another location to visit rather than a unifying point for my data.

Smashrun

I only came across this new site a few days ago. I've uploaded a few runs and so far it looks promising. What I do like so far is that their focus seems to be on detailed analysis of individual runs plus also trends over time. If they get the trend analysis right then they will have a real differentiator in the market.

Downsides seem to be at the moment that they only track runs (not other activity types like bike or swim), they have limited sync capabilities (so data import is manual TCX files for me), and there is no training planner / diary support. Still early days, but I will continue to watch this one, although not actively use it for the time being.

Swim.com

I was using swim.com with my Pebble watch to track and analyse my swimming sessions. I found their service very useful and the analysis features were nicely optimised for swimming. Unfortunately they don't support or plan sync for Suunto devices and they only seem to be able to handle Garmin specific FIT files.

I therefore don't use their site any more and I haven't yet found anything as good for analysis of swimming data.

iSmoothRun

Before I got my Ambit 3, my main activity tracking was via the iSmoothRun app on my iPhone. This is by far the best app on the market and has a huge amount of configuration and export options. It also has great support for audio cues, interval sessions and so forth. Having a dedicated GPS watch is much nicer, but I do miss many of the iSmoothRun features.

What I'm Looking For

Basically, I want it all! However, at the minimum, I'm after something that:

1. Allows me to upload, comment on, tag and analyse (in detail) individual activities (must support: run, bike and swim, plus multi-sport events like duathlons and triathlons)
2. Identifies and presents me with performance, fitness and training load trends over time for different types of activities, sessions and metrics
3. Provides a training planner tool that easily allows me to build and modify my plan
4. Provides a diary so that I can review sessions, comment on how sessions went, link activities to sessions, comment on weekly and other training cycles, define and track goals, and track usage of shoes and bikes
5. Support for capturing and analysing other metrics (e.g. sleep, body measurements, food intake, hydration, mood, motivation, injury etc.)
6. Route planning and sharing
7. Allow me to write blog entries and then publish my training diary, activities and blog entries to a single common page
8. Allow me to share content via Facebook and Twitter
9. Have a community element where I can join clubs and events, follow other user's activity feeds, diary and blogs, give them a virtual high-five and comment on their content

Secondary features that I would like to see include:

1. The ability to sync activities directly with Movescount so that they are automatically added just by syncing my watch (but I guess this is Suunto dependent)
2. The ability to sync my training plan with Movescount so that upcoming activities are always available on my watch (again, probably Suunto dependent)
3. The ability to customise and extend the data and trend analysis platform so that I can define my own additional metrics to track and which activities to include, display custom graphs of and so forth
4. Support for a wider range of activities that can be tracked (e.g. mountaing biking, hiking, yoga, pilates, strength, stretching, spin, skiiing, football etc.)
5. The ability to expose my training calendar using standard calendar exchange formats so that I can view my training plan from the Calendar application on my phone/laptop
6. An iOS app so that I can see, update and publish my training calendar and diary on the move
7. HealthKit integration on iOS so that metrics that I capture from other apps are automatically synced into my training diary
8. An open API, so that I (or other devs) can write our own tools, apps and site integrations on top of an open service/data platform
9. The ability to have a coach account so that (when I can finally afford a coach) they can build training plans for me, review my session stats and diary entries, add their own comments and track the long-term trends associated with my performance, so that they can continually improve my training plan

That's a lot to ask of a platform and its a very crowded market place to be entering. However, I'm currently playing for two services, each of which does part of what I'm after, but even together not the whole. I would certainly pay for a platform that meets even just my primary requirements (provide it's not too expensive – ideally less than £120 per year [5% of my training, kit and race entry budget]). I would hope that there is a significantly large body of athletes with similar requirements to me in order to make it viable.