I have been a long-time subscriber to SELF Magazine and kept back issues for more years than I would like to admit. I’ve seen the magazine change and evolve and always found something in its pages that interested me throughout my teenage years where I just wanted to be inspired to my college dieting years to my adult years of focusing on healthy fitness. To no fault of SELF (sorry SELF), I have been letting my subscription run out in favor of reading Runner’s World, running websites, and blogs which appeal directly to my current goals.

For several consecutive years, I was always inspired to participate in the SELF Challenge though I hate to admit I never fully finished. I did, however, become addicted to the magazine’s many online tools and always enjoyed entering my weekly exercise into my online log that would then calculate calories burned and track progress.

On my Twitter feed I was recently introduced to a relatively new website, RaceNation, designed to connect athletes, coaches, race directors, and fitness enthusiasts in an online athletic community. I signed up. My list of online accounts where I track user names and passwords has grown to 5 pages and RaceNation is now one of at least half a dozen running/fitness websites I have joined. Their registration process was extremely easy and I found the entire site simple to navigate though I think it’s still in the early stages of growing in members and content. One of the things I like the best is its online training log. I was suddenly back in my SELF Challenge mindset and excited about entering my recent work-outs to track my progress.

It dawned on me that experimenting with training logs would be a fantastic series of articles that has the dual purpose of education as well as progress tracking for myself. The experiment is a bit off already considering it’s a Thursday in the middle of a month, but nonetheless I have decided to make this a new project starting with the training log in my RaceNation profile. I entered my work-outs for this week and will continue to use the log for a solid month and will report on the experience at the end of a month before switching to the next online log.

Logs I plan to work with include: Runner’s World, MapMyRun, and Cool Running (powered by Active.com); who knows, maybe I’ll even reactivate my SELF account.

Do you have a training log you prefer?