Keeping track

So, today I went to the gym to see where i'm at and to be honest, I am very positively surprised on how much capacity lingered around from when I stopped running last year. Of course I have been skating at least twice a week, but I had still expected a much worse result than what I got today.

To be able to keep track and to compare later results with earlier ones you need a way of record keeping and a way of testing that is easily repeatable (for example always the same part of a trail or just on a treadmill or something like that). Since there is still lots of snow here (and more to come) I have decided to make my "test environment" the treadmill. There I can easily keep track of time, speed and heart rate. Those three parameters are linked together like your skin is linked to you. So if you want to asses how fit you are you need to be able to have some sort of measure of all three of those.

Time is of course no problem! Stopwatch, phone, watch, etc.
Speed is also easily come by. You either run on a treadmill which will tell you your speed (NOT comparable to outdoors), you know how long the trail you use is and calculate it with using the time measurement or you can even use the GPS in your phone. If you have an iPhone there are a ton of aps that can help you with that. When I ran outdoors I used to like "1, 2, 3, run!" or "Runkeeper."
Heartrate can be a bit trickier. If you are serious about your training it is well worth it to by a pulse watch. It exists of a band that you wear around your chest (just under the bottom band of your bra) that sends the signal to either a wristwatch or a gym machine. You could of course also use the metal handgrips of the treadmill/bike/crosstrainer so that your heart rate shows up on the display, but I don't recommend it since those are usually not placed in the most ideal positions. Another option is to use a self estimation scale. It's a scale invented by a dude called Borg and goes from 5 to 20. You estimate how exerting your current level of activity is where 5 means laying on the sofa and 20 means "water.... need... wa-..." Smart people have found out that a Borg estimation times 10 roughly equals current heart rate in the estimator: a Borg estimation of exertion of 17 roughly equals a heart rate of about 170. If you are about 20 to 25 years old, that is. The problem with this is that it is of course a lot less objective than a measurement of your actual heart rate: "*panting*... *coughing* I think I feel.. like.. *more panting and stumbling* .. mwoah.. 9?"

Ok, my way of record keeping for this first goal will be like this:

10x7, 8x(2x10, 1x6), 10x6 (heart rates: 175 - 165)

Wich means: a warm up of 10 mins of walking at 7 km/h then 8 sets of 2 mins of jogging at 10 km/h followed by 1 min of walking at 6 km/h, closed of by a cooling down of 10 mins of walking at 6 km/h. The two heart rates is the highest heart rate measured during the last run and the lowest heart rate measured during the minute that followed that run (of course it will go down more after that).

Why do I want the heart rates there? Because I probably could do the running parts at 12 km/h right now, but my heart rate would go up accordingly since it would be a much heavier thing to do. So only writing down what you can do is not a measure of your fitness. Also knowing how easy it was to do what you did tells you how fit you are.