So now that triathlon season has come and gone, with zero three-sport races completed (though technically, I guess I did complete one swim, one bike, and one run, for a total of one full complete triathlon), what’s next?

First and foremost, I have to keep working to rehab my left shoulder and arm. It’s definitely weak, but it hurts less every day. It still hurts every day, but it’s to the point where I have to think about if it’s hurting or not – it’s not super persistent. Either that or I’m just getting better at ignoring it. I also need to continue to work on rehabbing my hip. With my arm injury, I let my PT exercises fall by the wayside on my hip and I can definitely tell the difference. It’s a good reminder to just keep up that strength work.

I do have races left on the calendar – all running races. This coming weekend, I’m racing the Army Ten Miler for what I believe is the 11th year. I didn’t intend to streak this race, but I love the race and I love the 10 mile distance, so I’m glad to be running again. Then, Thanksgiving weekend, I’m running the Space Coast Half Marathon for the 7th year. Clearly I don’t mind repeating races. To me, that race has become synonymous with the start of the holiday season. It’s sort of the last relaxing weekend before the holiday insanity starts. (And yes, I realize how ridiculous it sounds to call a race weekend a relaxing weekend.)

I’ve only put a little thought into 2020 so far. I’m running the Disney 10K because it’s on my birthday, then cheering for the half and full. I considered running the half, then decided to save the money for future stupid ideas.

For triathlon season, I have a few races deferred following my injury (thank you, Kinetic Multisports and Racine Multisports). So if the schedules work out, I’ll be doing Fort Ritchie Swimfest (distances TBD, but hopefully the full 4500), the Kinetic Oly, General Smallwood Oly, and possibly the Patriot’s Sprint.

I have officially registered for one triathlon. Rev3 Williamsburg is BACK! I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see this race come back. I love Rev3 races and I love getting to see so many of my friends out on the race course. So I’ll be out there for the Olympic at the end of June.

Mostly, I just need to get back into a solid routine. It’s been a whirlwind of a summer, most of it wonderful, but now that my arm is at about 80%, it’s time to get back to work!

Disclaimer: I received a Strava Summit account in exchange for a review as part of being a BibRave Pro. Learn more about becoming a BibRave Pro (ambassador), and check out BibRave.com to review, find, and write race reviews.

I’m a huge fan of tracking my workouts. I’d love to be one of those people who keeps a great training notebook, logging every workout in every detail. I’m not great at that. Every time I’ve tried, I end up not having the book with me when I want to write something down.

I tried the spreadsheet formula. That didn’t work either. I wasn’t motivated to get it done.

Enter the internet. By tracking my workouts online, I could enter data from anywhere, and if I wanted, I could make that information sharable so that my friends and training partners could see my workouts. It helped keep me accountable to myself and to others.

Strava is simple

I started using Strava in 2015. What I love the most about Strava is how incredibly easy it is to use. You can track all sorts of workouts – standard running, biking, and swimming, but you can also track other workouts – walking, yoga, weights, whatever you want. And you can enter as much or as little data as you want. Maybe you just want to log that you lifted weights for 30 minutes. You don’t need to put in the reps or the weights, just log that 30 minute data. Maybe you went on a 20 minute walk. You don’t know how far you went, but you want to log the walk. Other sites would push you to enter the pace or the distance. Strava lets you enter what you want.

Of course, I love data, so I love that I can import directly from my Garmin or from Zwift. And the best part is that I don’t have to actually do anything. Once I got direct import setup, when I finish a workout, it ports into Strava where I can check it out and analyze the info. I can customize it if I want by adding photos or comments, but I don’t have to.

I use also Strava to track the mileage on my shoes, which is an awesome feature, especially for someone who doesn’t run a steady number of miles every month. I set my current pair of shoes as my default, and Strava logs each run on those shoes (which I can go in and change if I wore something different). It helps me figure out when I need to think about breaking in a new pair.

Share what you want

Strava lets you be as public or as private as you want. You can put all of your information out there for anyone to see, you can have a purely private account, or you can be private and add friends who can see your workouts.

Personally, even though I’m a pretty open book, I do have my account set for friends only, just for safety. If you want to follow me, please feel free to request, and if you appear to not be an axe murderer, I’ll probably friend you back. And if you are an axe murderer, if you could just put that in your profile info to make it easier for me, I’d appreciate it.

One thing I do very much appreciate are the privacy zones. When you do a workout and track your distance by GPS, often times, you’re starting pretty close to your home or your work, and maybe you’re just not comfortable putting your exact location out there. Strava lets you set privacy zones up to 5/8ths of a mile from a specific address, and then any activity inside that zone won’t be shown.

Tracking Improvements

When I agreed to do a review of Strava, I figured it would be very easy. After all, I’ve been using Strava for four years to track my running, biking, and swimming. It’s what I use to track my annual mileage goals.

Then I crashed my bike and was unable to train. No training = no workouts logged. (And the annual mileage goals also went out the window.)

But now that I’m getting back into the swing of things, I’m starting to track again. It’s certainly slow going (and I’m still not back in the pool or riding outdoors) but what I’m loving is being able to see the progress that I’m making. Sure, my speed and distance aren’t what they were, but I’m doing better than I was two weeks ago.

I can also look back and see where I was after recovering from surgery last year, which gives me an idea of how long this rebuild may take. And I can look further back and see that hey, maybe things aren’t so bad after all.

Strava tracks your best efforts, and it’s always a great feeling to log on after a bad run and see that hey, you just did your third best 5k effort as part of that run, or you ran a certain segment of your running route the fastest you’ve ever run it. I find these stats especially helpful on days where I feel like I’m not making progress. Maybe I don’t feel faster, but I’m certainly getting faster.

And the best part of all of this tracking is that in a few months, I’ll be able to look back to where I was and be proud of how far I’ve come. It’s so easy to look back at a previous race result and think “Oh, man, look at all the speed I’ve lost,” but by tracking my short little runs as I’m recovering, I have something solid to look back on as I track my recovery.

And you had better believe that when I finally get my bike back outside, I’m going to be shouting it from the rooftops and I expect all the Strava accolades to be coming my way.

My word of the year is challenge, and that’s something I’ve been focusing on as I set my race schedule for the year. I’ve had the races for the first half of the year pretty well locked down – a few olympics as tune-up and rehearsal for my big goal, IM 70.3 Ohio. But that only takes me through July. July is when my race season started last year, thanks to injury and surgery.

I started looking at what will come after July, with the idea of a challenge in the back of my mind.

I decided I wanted to finally tackle the series challenge with a local race group, which means doing at least five of their races. I’ve already got three on my schedule, so adding two more doesn’t sound too bad.

One thing I’ve never done is a back to back triathlon, racing both Saturday and Sunday. I’ve done it with half marathons, but not in a few years. So an added challenge for the year is going to be a Saturday olympic and Sunday sprint. The hardest part is going to be getting out of bed both days, I suspect!

So as of right now, here’s what I’m looking at:

• 4/20 – Rumpus in Bumpass Olympic
• 5/11 – Kinetic Olympic
• 5/25 – Swimfest 4500
• 6/15 – General Smallwood Olympic
• 7/28 – 70.3 Ohio
• 8/24 – Farm to Fork Fondo (tentative)
• 9/7-8 – Patriot’s Olympic and Sprint (tentative)
• 10/13 – Army Ten Miler (tentative)
• 12/1 – Space Coast Half Marathon

The “tentative” just means that I haven’t plunked down the cash yet for the race. I’m also thinking I’ll add some more running races in the fall, maybe the Baltimore half, which I haven’t run in years. I should also pick up some 10ks here and there as time permits.

Given how little I raced last year, this feels like a lot, but I’m excited to tackle the challenge. I love the camaraderie of racing, and I’m looking forward to getting back out there.

I’ve talked about cheating at races before, including about the people I’ve seen cheating at Disney races. But it seems to be an ongoing problem. If you aren’t already following Marathon Investigation, you should. Derek does an amazing job calling out cheaters at races. While his articles do typically focus on people who are cheating and winning awards or cheating to get into the Boston Marathon, he does also post about the average cheater, the person who wasn’t going to win anyway, but decides to cheat in some way.

There are a couple of different types of cheating. You have course cutters, who just refuse to complete the distance. You have people who create fake race bibs, either copying a friend’s or finding a photo online and using it to print a bib. Then there are the extra creative cheaters, like the people who turn a race into a relay, so one person starts the course, then they sneakily swap bibs, and another person finishes.

In this kind of information age, I’m always shocked by people who try to cheat and then deny it when they get called out. Not only should there be tracking data from a timing chip provided by the race, but frequently there are photos, and oftentimes, runners also have GPS data from their watches or phones.

Timing chips are never perfect. In recent years, I’ve had two different races where timing chip data was an issue. In one, my chip just didn’t register. In the other, I lost my chip taking off my wetsuit and didn’t realize it. But in both, I had GPS data to prove that I completed the entire race. I was never questioned on it, but if I had been, I had the information to back it up.

(I used to joke that no one would look at my results and think I was cheating, but I’ve come to see that that isn’t true – people aren’t just cheating to qualify for awards, they’re cheating just to get a finisher’s medal, which seems absolutely insane.)

The question is what should races do about these cheaters? Many of them are ultimately disqualified in the results, but if you’re just cheating to get a medal, you probably don’t care about that at all. Should they be banned from future races? For the repeat offenders, absolutely. And maybe the threat of banning after one incident would also stop some of the cheating.

Disney has tried to make it harder for people to get Goofy and Dopey medals. There are wristbands. There are photos (or so I’m told – I’ve never run either). But people can still cut the course or jump on to the course late in the race and still “finish.” Apparently, this year during the Disney marathon, there were runners seen on the monorail and runners jumping into the race at the Beach Club, which is just a couple of miles from the finish line. I really wonder Disney actually cares. What’s the harm in a small percentage of runners cheating the system, if the vast majority are doing what they’re supposed to do? Shouldn’t their focus be placed on making sure that those runners have an awesome, safe race?

While I’m not a huge fan of public shaming, I do enjoy seeing these cheaters getting called out, specifically the ones who have bragged about their “accomplishment” online. They did something wrong, they know they did something wrong, and maybe this will force them to see the truth.

And maybe it will help convince others that a DNF is worth so much more than a fake finish. There is a ton of integrity in fighting through a race, not giving up, but not being able to finish. At the end of the day, a medal is a fun shiny object, but knowing you did the right thing carries much more weight.