REPORTING FRUSTRATION

I’ve been looking for a cycling performance software that I could do good reporting out of my riding. One that I could do year, months and week comparisons for distance, heart rate (average and by effort zones) and climbing meters. How hard could that be?! Very…

Estive procurando por um programa de análise do meu treino e as minhas corridas. Um programa em eu pudesse fazer comparações de anos, meses e semanas de distância, ritmo cardíaco e metros de subida. Quão difícil pode ser isso com tantos programas por aí? Bastante…

The first one I looked after moving from the Sigma Rox 9.0 to Garmin was naturally the Garmin software, both the stand alone Training Center and the Garmin Connect. Both sucks big time. The training center is not user friendly to navigate and doesn’t have any reporting capabilities. The Connect is a bit better but not by much. Even the so called big upgrade is little more than a joke, basically a facelift of the same engine. Sucks and the new reporting is so basic that doesn’t provide any insights.

So, I started looking outside, for software that I could import gps files. The first one was SportTracks. It is quite neat application, with loads of capabilities and reporting dashboards. Even in the free version. You can see heart rate zones break of each ride, day, week or month. Create lots of reports combinations with different fields and visuals. One I like quite a lot is average heart rate vs. average speed on top of climbing meters or distance. It gives me an indication of how much effort I’m putting into it and how much better I’m getting.

However, again, I only managed to report consecutive weeks, months or years. I didn’t manage to compare week to same week of last year (or month or full year). I want to see how much calories I’ve consumed in a specific period vs. same period of previous year. How much more distance did I climbed or how higher was my average heart rate. Or even how much more time did I stay on performance zones (z4 and 5). But that is not possible.

So, I turned into Golden Cheetah. This is at the moment my preferred application. You have quite some liberty to create lots of reports and it has quite some nice features like trimp points calculations, performance load, stress balance, etc. I’m actually driving my whole training by trimp points per week and performance load (long term stress and stress balance). But I can’t report period comparisons. I can create reports again of average heart rate, distance, effort but not comparisons.

So, I’m forced to export data manually and painstakingly to Excel and do my own reports. Which is exactly what all those applications should be avoiding…

And finally a friend showed me Veloviewer.com. That is a website that works as a add-on for Strava made by a guy that was as frustrated with what is out there as I am. The difference is that he is a bit more skilled than me and create the website to perform those comparisons and adjust my training to achieve better results. First the year comparisons for distance, elevation, time and number of initiatives. Also the hotspot map of the rides with all the averages for heart rate, power, etc. And this with lots of filtering capabilities.

On top of that there is a neat graph of rides by distance over time with a comparison of elevation and average speed. All with clickable dots for details. Fucking fantastic. And to complete there is the wheel. Just nice!

And the bad news? The only way to get access to it is via Strava. Which I don’t want to have. I don’t want to be on Strava. I have a somewhat obsessive personality and if I start looking what other people are doing for training, I might start doing more than I should for my own training. So, the door is closed to me…

And than the question is: why the hell is so difficult for all those other companies to create reporting capabilities like that? One week of work of a Business Intelligence team would bring their software to a level higher but they prefer to keep working on facelifts and plastic surgery and not on the engine…