Daily notes

Today we're happy to announce a note-worthy enhancement to SportTracks: Daily notes!

Daily notes are a super simple yet useful way to enhance your workout log, allowing you to record descriptive information on things that happen outside of structured workouts. If you're diligent about recording daily notes, you'll find you have a richer and more complete snapshot when you look back at your fitness history from prior years. All those intangible facts about your health and/or illnesses, stress level, what was going on with your family or at work will be right there alongside your workouts.

They're also a great way to share scheduling information with your coach, or for your coach to provide tips outside your training plan. We'll see more on that later.

Create a daily note

As previously mentioned, daily notes are super simple. Click on the calendar tab in the header. If you're in the monthly or weekly view, you'll now notice a note icon appears when you move your mouse over a particular day:

To create a note, click the note icon and enter your text:

Boom. Done. If you're not working with a coach, you can stop reading now. Go forth and enhance your diary!

Coaching features

If you're working with a coach, or if you're a coach working with your client, daily notes get a bit more sophisticated.

For athletes: Any notes you add on your calendar are also visible by your coach. As I show in the screenshot above this is a really simple way to tell your coach about your schedule and days you're not available. When your coach is adding workouts for your training plan, the note will appear right there in the plan for them to refer to.

For coaches: Just as you'd expect, you can now add notes to the calendar of your clients. This is a great way to communicate goals for off days when your athletes don't have any workouts planned, or to provide motivation in a run up to a race. You can also use this to pop up notes on the athlete's dashboard - things you feel might be higher priority than the normal notes you add to a planned workout.

The method to add a client note is the same as above. Go to the client calendar, click a day, and add your notes.

When the athlete comes back to look at their calendar, they will now see a note icon for that day. They can click the note for details, and add their own notes in a separate tab.

If you're planning backwards from a target race date a good workflow might be:

1. Go to the date of the race and add a planned workout with the subtype "Race", with the distance and target time goals. You might want to put a link to the race website in the workout notes.
2. Add a note one or two days prior with your "race day tips". If you're doing long term planning, you can paste in some general coaching information. When the date comes closer you can go edit the note to reflect information which is more relevant to your athlete.

Coached athlete dashboard view

The last change we made for coached athletes is adding those upcoming notes that your coach entered to the upcoming workouts section of your dashboard. If you've been reading along, take a look at how this pre-race scenario will play out on your dashboard:

When you see a coach note on your dashboard you'll discover you can click the note to view extended narrative. The dialog also includes a convenient button to instantly send a message to your coach:

Coach Z thinks everything is going well, but Homestar is not so sure he can make it through 0.262 miles:

When Homestar clicks Send, Coach Z will get an in-app notification and an email. If things are going off the rails this late, it might mean coach needs to give him a call.

Using your imagination, you can also see how this is a great way for coaches to pre-schedule a follow up note after races or time trials. A simple "How did it go?" note will prompt the client and the reply button is only a click away.

We hope these new features enhance your training and coaching experience.

~Enjoy