RunAthena.com :: Gear Reviews

While some people enjoy the flexibility and feature-rich experience of keeping an electronic or online log of their running miles and workouts, others prefer the classic feel of putting pen or pencil to paper. If you are thinking about logging your miles on paper in 2007, you might want to take a look at these two products designed for that task.

The folks at Runner's World offer a handy little training log to help you track your mileage and training regimen as you prepare for a big race. The Runner's World Training Diary offers you the flexibility of deciding when you want your log to start. There are no fixed dates in the diary. You decide when "Week 1" begins, and fill in the dates for the days of the week as you go.

The format is a two-page-per-week layout, with space under each day for

• notes on your run
• pace, weather and distance for your run
• mileage total for the week to date

Also included in the two-page spread is a summary section, and separate sections to log your daily weight and your resting pulse every morning.

The journal also includes handy pacing and training charts, and sheets for recording races and tracking cumulative annual miles.

However, the Runner's World Training Diary is designed to help you get prepared for one big race -- the training log portion of the journal gives you less than 25 weeks of logging space.

If you're looking for a good training log that will get see you through the year, you should consider The Complete Runner's Day-By-Day Log and Calendar by Marty Jerome. This diary is tied to the yearly calendar, so the day of the week and the date are pre-printed. The diary does follow a two-page-per-week format, but offers one space to tally weekly distance, and one space to log weight. Of course, there is ample room under each day's entry to log weight, pulse, or anything else you need to make note of.

Marty Jerome's diary also features monthly motivational or informational sections, weekly motivational quotes, and black-and-white photos of real runners doing their thing for every week of the year. In the back of the diary is a chart with marathon split times, as well as special pages dedicated to logging races and creating bar graphs to give you a week-by-week visual of your running mileage for the year.

Because the Marty Jerome diary also works as a calendar or daily planner, it is the product I chose to purchase for myself. I'm looking forward to filling every page in 2007.