Today we are thrilled to announce the public release of our brand new entirely redesigned personal records page. The new design takes the idea of a "trophy room" to a whole new level with some innovative features we think you'll like. This is a big feature release so be sure to read through to the end to get a full picture of everything you can do.
Interactively explore your PR history
When you visit the new PR page, you'll immediately notice a few new buttons at the top. You can now filter your data by sport and by date.
It seems simple at first, but this is an extremely powerful new way to look at your best efforts seasonally. For example, you can quickly filter by Cycling and click the previous year button to see how your Critical Power progressed over the year. We also show your estimated FTP for the time period, as well as your fastest times at common race distances.
Explore your progression through time
Below the header section is an entirely new visualization we've created to show your PR progression over time. Let me introduce you to the PR Timeline:
In the PR Timeline you'll see a circle for every workout where you broke a record during the time period. Move your mouse over the PR Timeline to highlight a PR stream for a particular record. For example - below is an illustrated history of every time I broke my 5K running PR:
I've got records all the way back to my first race in 2004 with my Forerunner 205 to my current record which was (sadly) in 2010. Move your mouse over a particular record to get more details, and a link to the workout:
The timeline reflects any sport and date filtering you've added. The image above is a great illustration of how you can use this. I haven't broken my 5K time (22:24) since 2010, but I did have a nice 8K in 2014 and I'm curious how that season stacked up. To find out it's as easy as filtering by 2014 and moving my mouse over the PR Timeline:
Ok... I was off by 1m 29s, not great. But what if I had only missed my PR by a second or two? You'd never know this from a PR page that only shows your best "all time" workouts. With our interactive timeline, you can reveal seasonal best efforts that may have otherwise been hidden.
~That's actually pretty cool~
You can also see from above that day I had seasonal PRs in every other distance (notice the vertical line of circles). That makes sense, I didn't have any other serious races in 2014.
Below the PR Timeline you'll see two columns of records - workout and time based.
Workout (segment) records
The left side should be familiar - this is the standard list of distance-based records you see in pretty much every app. But we've also made a significant leap forward here. Before the app only calculated your PRs if the entire workout distance matched the target distance. PRs are now calculated based on every portion of your workout that meets that minimum distance - what we lovingly call "segment records".
What does this mean in plain terms? You can PR a 5K (or 1 mile, or 800m) at any longer distance - whether that is a 10K or marathon, we'll search the entire workout for your fastest segments and that will now "count" as a PR if it's faster.
In addition, when you click the PR (from the table or the PR Timeline) and zoom over to the workout you'll see the fastest segment conveniently highlighted in the workout details - on the chart, in the map, and in the browser URL which you can share with your friends.
At this point if you're following closely, you may be asking yourself - why is his best 1 mile PR in the last mile of an 8K race?!? There is actually a story to that which involves a bit of friendly competition - another reason why these new interactive PR features are so cool.
A note about official race records and historical records before you started tracking with GPS.
While the system will calcualte every segment record within a workout, you can also "override" a faster record by manually editing the workout and entering the exact race distance and chiptime. This is useful if for example the GPS bonked and came up short on your marathon, not giving you credit for the last 0.1 mile - just go in and edit the distance to 26.2.
This is also useful if you're new to the system and have old records you want to manually enter. It's as easy as creating historical workouts for those dates with the correct race distance and PR time. Grab your paper notebook of PRs and click the Add Workout > Enter Details menu item to enter them.
Timely records
To the right of the distance speed records column you'll find a new set of records that are calculated from your workout history. Here you'll find the time periods where you maxed your workout totals in: time, distance, elevation gain, calories, and effort. Like the PR Timeline and distance records, these records are also limited to any sport or date filter you've chosen, so you can show records for runs, bike rides, or even skiing.
From the top to the bottom you'll find a block each:
- Best efforts for any single workout.
- Best efforts for any single calendar month.
- Best efforts for any single calendar year.
And, like the PR Timeline and distance records sections, all of these records have hyperlinks allowing you to jump to the relevant time period on your calendar.
Viewing sport-specific records like critical power
When you first visit the personal records page the sport and date filters are blank. You'll see all your current records for time and distance, along with the timeline at the top.
For multi-sport athletes - this can be a lot of data to absorb in one glance. With that in mind you won't see sport-specific records until you set your filter to a particular sport. This also makes sense for records that really don't make sense to mix across sports.
A great example of this is critical power - it's only relevant for cycling. To view critical power and estimated FTP, set the sport filter to cycling.
At this point the only sport-specific metric is critical power, but new ones may come in the future.
Removing bad records
The last feature I want to talk about is correcting PR records.
The downside of sub-segment record calculations is that the system has a lot higher reliance on your data being "good". A few minutes of lost GPS signal and suddenly your 400m time is faster than Usain Bolt. A spike in your power sensor and your 60 second critical power puts you in competition with elites. There are a bit of checks in the processing routines to ask "is this even humanly possible?" - those get tossed out - but there are times when you just need to manually remove a PR you know is bad.
Not a problem. We also allow you to remove individual segment records for any calculated PR, taking them out of your "trophy case". You may have noticed a lot of small trash can icons next to your records when you move the mouse over them. Simply click the icon in the segment record table or timeline and the PR is removed.
Have a coach? Or maybe you are a coach?
As you can see above we've added a lot of new features in this release. We've also made an important improvement to our security permissions for personal records. Starting today your coach can view your personal records page - just like your calendar, workouts, health and analysis pages.
If you're a coach, this means you can go look at your athlete's best efforts, using all the same filtering and interactive features that athletes get described above, including critical power bests from last season, or two years ago, and how they compare to where your athlete is at now. Important stuff.
But wait... there's more
In the personal records page you're seeing the result of a fundamental redesign of our records processing. Records are now processed at the segment level. Records are now calculated for multiple metrics (speed, power and heart rate... so far). And we've engineered an entirely new processing pipeline for record calculation to ensure website performance remains high.
This opens up a lot of new opportunities that you'll see delivered in the future. We haven't committed to putting any of these on the short-term roadmap yet, but we'd like to get you excited about potential by hinting at features we can now add with a LOT less effort:
- Records notification. You just finished a run and broke a record. It would be nice to get an email telling you that, right? It would also be nice for your coach to know, and maybe your friends on Facebook too. This is especially relevant for time trials where you hit a new high in your critical power. Maybe time to revisit your FTP?
- Workout comparison to best efforts. It's great to see how a particular workout you just completed compares with your best efforts. Now that we calculate segment records, it makes sense to show them in workout details. For example: "This run was your 5th (of 12) fastest 10K this year".
- Workout CP plots compared to best. Similar to #2 above, it makes a lot of sense to allow you to overlay your best CP efforts over the CP plot on the workout details.
- Race predictor. You've run a few 5K and 10K races - how would you do in a half marathon? We've now got data that we can use as inputs to algorithms that predict race times.
- Badges and accomplishments and challenges. Hurray - you rode 500KM in one weekend!! Beast mode!! A lot of websites do this. It's not really our focus, but we can easily add badges and accomplishments into our processing pipeline if people demand it.
- Comparison rank. We now have all the records of your friends - and strangers in your city and age group. Showing where you rank would be an obvious next step.
- More metrics! Vertical ascent records? Runstreaks? Farthest travelled between two workouts? Yep, we can add these too.
Shut up and tell me how to get this!
To access your personal records, move your mouse over your profile photo in the upper right corner of the website header and select "Personal Records" from the menu.
WHEW! This is getting into DCRainmaker territory. That's enough talk about software for now. Time to get out there and chase a few new personal records!
Questions, comments, feedback? Hit us below.
Comments
Aaron - what I am looking for is personal bests for the distance not segment bests. Given all the work on segment bests, which no doubt some people want based on your posts, would it not also be possible to have a toggle option between segments and segments where you are running that distance explicitly. To be honest it is not a big ask coding wise as it is only a line to exclude segments which do not match that distance overall for the workout from which they were selected. With that the great work you have done would become more relevant also to me as a paying customer. Right now I maintain that list of records seperately with history..
Mark
Great work Aaron. I really like what you've done. However I've noticed a few problems.
1) Best Workouts is missing trash cans. I have a workout where my Garmin Edge 500 recorded me instantly leaping up almost 2000M into the sky, riding a few meters then plummeting back down by about 1000M. Given that my organs weren't crushed by the instant acceleration and deceleration, I think that perhaps the data is wrong somehow. I would like to exclude that data or at least fix it.
2) My "Best Effort" workout was one that I had not power meter or heart rate monitor with me. I doubt the validity of the effort score for that ride. I would like to be able to remove it.
3) When I try to set a date range of April 1st to today I get a "Unexpected literal at position 2." error.
4) Filter by cycling, click on a workout, then click the browser back button. Left side data is now missing. Clicking on profile photo->Personal Records also returns with the left side data missing.
1&2. We don't allow removal of workouts from the bests list - only from fastest segments. I've added that to the enhancement list.
3&4. Bug. Fixed.
As I'm wading through my 1400+ 1 mile fastest run segments, I'm noticing a lot of unreasonably fast times that I need to delete. When I click on the specific workouts to see the data, it appears that they all have either a pause or watch stop located within the segment and its not calculating that correctly. Would it be possible for you guys to filter out any segments that include a watch pause or stop in it?
It was not too time consuming to delete the 5k segments, but the 1 mile and shorter records may take all weekend and I should really go out for a run.
Yes - I had the same. Most of the shorter records included pauses and were in fact taken from interval sessions where there was a pause between efforts. Filtering these out would be ideal.
Swimming distance records should also only include the intervals and not the time at the wall. I've never swam a straight 1.2 miles but I have several 1.2 mile records and I doubt I could swim straight through at a pace faster then my 0.5 mile tri race swim.
1. Would it be possible to allow a user to submit a 'floor' value where anything below this would be ignored ? This would prevent future 'false bests' from being registered if, for example, there is a GPS error.
2. Would it also be possible to enable to users to submit their own distance to be used ? For example, I like 10 mile races and use 10 miles as a good tempo session during training. Could you either add 10 miles to the list, or allow me to enter my own distances ?
Anything is possible! And I've added your ideas to the list of future enhancements. Some thoughts:
1. I get where you're going with this, but I'm not thrilled by adding more settings and things that the user is required to configure for exceptional scenarios. Because the reality is 0.001% of the users will even find that, let alone know what to do with it. Our guiding design principle is to make things "just work" and get out of the users way.
So... since this is a brand new feature, we're going to wait to collect feedback and see how it performs. If too many bad records are happening, there are other approaches we can take to filter them out automatically. For example we can see when GPS sample rate drops, or compare new records to existing records and triage them based on how much faster it is (ignore if way too fast, promt user if it's possible, but unlikely, and accept automatically if it's within a reasonable range). We can also look at prior workout volume up to the PR, and basically make a decision - yeah, this is a legit new PR.
2. This isn't terribly hard to implement. Probably we want a "settings" button on each block, to allow users to customize the distance list (add or remove unwanted).
The only real trick is that if you add a new distance we need to go back and re-process all your workouts, which can be fairly time consuming. It's not difficult to queue up the processing but you might need to wait a few minutes to an hour depending on how many years of history you have.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hi Aaron and ST team
Thanks for this feature - it is one of the best implementations of personal records I have seen.
I do have one request - is it possible to do a sub-filter by different types of sports activities. For example, for training I like to keep track of my personal bests on my bicycle turbo trainer, but also want to keep track of my personal bests when out on the road. BUT I don't want to compare between them.
Similarly I know that my PBs in open water swims are not as good as pool swims, but I want to see how each of them progresses separately.
Just put this down to another feature request.
Cheers
Mark
Can the filtering to remove obviously bad data be updated to remove any data faster than at least 3 min/mile pace for the mile or longer? All my PR's were swamped by many runs and workouts that were at 2:53 or 2:54 pace (caused by running on a moving cruise ship or much more commonly where there was no or poor GPS data). Considering the WR is still nearly a minute slower than that I don't think this would negatively effect anyone for the foreseeable future but would save a lot of people a lot of time in the meantime.
I like this feature a lot but I'd like to suggest you add a bit of tolerance to the distances to allow for GPS inaccuracy. I ran a PB marathon yesterday and my Garmin 310 XT recorded the distance as 42.58km, which is probably about right. What ST seems to do is look at my time when the watch reached 42.195km and count that as a record, so it's given me a record of 3:31:58 instead of the 3:33:49 I actually ran. I know I could manually edit the distance down to 42.195 and fix this, but I shouldn't need to. Nobody ever runs the exact marathon distance in a race, so why not just allow for this margin of error when calculating records? After all, even Garmin Connect manages this!
Yup, the software does have a "tolerance" range, but it's a lot smaller than 0.43 km / 0.25 miles.
Unfortunately the app can't know if your GPS is off, if the course was measured wrong, or if you just ran longer. At the end of the day, if you want to use course distance + chiptime instead of GPS measured distance, you'll definitely need to adjust the PR manually.
OK, I can do that, but I think you need to increase the tolerance a bit. 385m (not 430) is less than 1% and less than the margin of error of any GPS device, without factoring in that you can't ever run the optimum line in a marathon. Looking back through previous races, this the time watch seems to be nearer the real distance than it usually is.
Hello.
Amazing software love it.
A question of the "just short race".
Ran a marathon today. Gatmin 735xt logs as 42.04km. Just short
I have manually edited the distance to 42.2 and 42.195 and after saving the personal records ARE NOT updated.
Any way of getting my new PB on the list?
Hmmm! It seems I needed to wait more time. Overnight it has updated!
Amazing software. Intrical part of my training.
Thankyou
Small suggestion.
In personal records be able to click on a category and see all runs of that type.
Eg I have 25 half marathons. It picks my fastest perfectly... But would be great to see top 10 or all 25 of those halfs in a list to easily compare (show them like details in workouts screen
Zain
Hey Zain,
Please find our feature request page here: https://sporttracks.uservoice.com/
You can look at ideas, vote for them, subscribe to updates and add your own ideas too.
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