Logging?

Uh, wait a minute, there. Not those logs! I\’m not Paul Bunyan, you know. I don\’t think I\’m ready to try birling, either. Neither do I have a wood-burning stove to feed.

But a cycling log can be handy. You can keep notes in any notebook, or be fancy and get The Cyclist\’s Training Diary. I kept both for one year; the inexpensive drug-store notebook as a \”rough log\”, and the expensive one as a \”fair log\”.

It was worth a try, but the \”fair log\” turned out to be as much of a jumble as the \”rough log\”. My far from stellar penmanship didn\’t help much. I\’ve since returned to keeping my ride logs in 5-subject notebooks from the drugstore. Usually I do a page per day, even though that sometimes means only two lines on a page. It\’s a waste of paper, true, but it makes it a lot easier to find any particular date.

Why keep a log? You might want to go back and check something from an earlier ride: was that the day I saw the bald eagle? When was that morning when the fog was so terrible? Or, you might want to see whether your average speed has improved over time. It\’s also a good idea to have some kind of maintenance log, to keep track of tune-ups, repairs, etc. Some cyclists simply enjoy logging the miles, and watching them add up (I plead guilty😉).

The advantage to not having any kind of pre-printed log means you can tailor your log to your exact needs. And maybe, one day, we can toss them in the water and have that birling match!