Keep track of your riding
January 3rd, 2008 by Noah 
Well, I guess it’s my turn to post. I’m excited to be here among the other new writers and the familiar favorites.
I’m a geek that’s obsessed with statistics and numbers. At the beginning of 2007, I created a spreadsheet to track my miles. I’d only been riding for 3 months, and my goal was to watch as my rides got more frequent and more lengthy. 2008 is going to be my second full year of bike commuting and my goals have changed quite a bit. I’m continuing the tradition with a new spreadsheet that’s cleaner and tracks the things that I’m interested in:
- Car commute days: I want this number to be as low as possible for 2008!
- Bus-assisted multi-mode commutes, which are a blessing in the winter
- Separate mileage counters for commuting, errands, and recreation
- Separate mileage counters for each bike for maintenance purposes
- Temperature extremes
- Cold weather clothing logs to help me fine-tune my attire for those really chilly days
I created a simplified Excel spreadsheet for you to download. You can easily modify it or import it into Google Spreadsheets as well, or you could just use it as it is. If you don’t already have a method in place, now is the perfect time to start!
Download: 2008 Cycling Log
Do you keep track of your riding? If so, drop us a line and tell us what you use.
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http://www.bikejournal.com Ride-Log-Repeat
Nice spread sheet. I had started something like this in 2007, but lost track of it for a while and have not updated it in a while.
I think I’ll use yours for 2008 as it seems like a much more elegant solution than what I had. Maybe we can create a Commute by Bike one that everyone here can add to and share our total commuting stats. Just a thought.
Also a geek, obsessed with numbers and whatnot, I’ve been keeping track of my own rides on my personal site. I own a Garmin Edge, so I also use Motionbased.com. They have decent reporting there, and uploading the data directly from the Edge is crazy simple. I’ve tried traineo.com, and mapmyride.com, and have done some research into others, but bikejournal.com does appear to be pretty nice. I’m going to give that one a go for a bit and see how it works out.
“Cold weather clothing logs to help me fine-tune my attire for those really chilly days” - A very good idea! I don’t have a written one, but I have a mental chart stored that is fairly accurate. My commute in this morning was 18 degrees, but by the time lunch time rolled around, it was 50 degrees for our recreational ride! We were all a little caught off guard and couldn’t remember how to dress for 50 degrees. Most of us were a bit overdressed.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=f02341df144cd625f1afa83ae9b3a25b
I’ve come across an application that is on Facebook….it isn’t all that detailed….
You input your rides in the ride log and it will keep track of your totals for the year…….
This Month:
This Year:
Total Rides:
Total Time:
Ave. Speed:
Carbon Offset:
They also have an option for teams where you join and basically you just pool together all of your numbers for the team…..wouldn’t hurt to check it out if you are already on Facebook….The application doesn’t seem to be used by too many people at the moment. But I do think it is a great way to get more people interested in riding…
Yeah, put me down as another one for /www.bikejournal.com.
+1 for Bikejournal.com — why do all the “heavy lifting” with my mind when someone else has already set it up for me? Besides, I can log in from anywhere and update my stats and profile.
bikejournal.com - It’s fantastic, three of our four family members use it. And, like Ghost Rider mentioned above, you can add a ride from anywhere, work, home or when traveling. Buddy lists can also be created, and viewing your friends’ logs can be a great motivator to get out and ride.
Thanks for the input, guys.
I don’t have a GPS-based cyclocomputer, or else I’d probably be all over Motionbased. Still, there are a lot of things I like to keep track of a certain way, and I really couldn’t get any of the existing sites to give me the results and flexibility I was looking for.
Spreadsheets are miniature applications in their own right these days. They can grab data from other pages, make graphs and charts on the fly, and are pretty much limitless in what they can do with the data you enter. For someone like me, it’s clearly the right way to go about it.
Also, not to wax gFanboy, but Google Spreadsheets lets you update from anywhere as well as collaborating with others, including revision control. It would be trivial to keep an online team spreadsheet for all of the bike commuters you know in town, or anything of the sort.
I’m not a facebook user, but that facebook app looks pretty interesting as well.
But it’s already trivial to access bikejournal.com from anywhere, maintain team stats, etc.
And you can export as csv
activebody.org for me - tracks biking, running, swimming, weight training so if you are (or want to be) a triathlete it’s perfect. you can have teams - sounds like the buddy lists on bikejournal and there are “challenges” each season where the teams try and out ride etc each other. it also lets you compare yourself to all other users in your age/sex/other category on distance, climbing and other things.
Going against the flow… I use a perl script that logs data to a Mysql database and does all the necessary calculations for me to log it to my ride log. This also lets me plug in a back-end so I can have pretty graphs with MRTG and (hopefully) see miles logged increase more than costs do.
Hey Noah - those are great spreadsheets… I’m a biker and a spreadsheet fanatic… I posted those to the sharingdocs.blogspot.com blog, where I highlight some cool uses of speadsheets using Google Docs. Note that I created a “template” link for people to easily get a Google Docs copy of your .xls file - and I added a link back to your site within the spreadsheet itself (that’s something you should always do)…
Also - you can easily embed a published view of your spreadsheet within your blog post (use the publish tab / more publishing options / format: “html to embed in a web page” ) - which looks cool when you have charts or nice formatting like you do…
Happy riding!
JR
I also use bikejournal.com. It’s great because you can configure it to track whatever types of data are important to you. And you can access it anywhere where there’s web. So far, it’s everything I need, but I’ll check out your spread sheet and see what else is possible. I love keeping track of stuff like this. Thanks for posting!
I use http://www.mycyclinglog.com and enjoy it a lot. You can log various statistics about each ride and tag your rides as mountain, road, commute, etc. You also create profiles for your bikes and log per bike. There’s a co2 tag and a thing that shows you how many tons of CO2 emissions you’ve avoided by riding, for those who care about that. It’ll also estimate how much money you’ve saved.
But to me, the best parts are the reports. You can select a date range and see all manner of reports.
I use my company’s intranet to track bike commutes. Was not aware of activebody.org, as Joel suggests, and find it really useful for the weekend trial runs.
I too use http://www.mycyclinglog.com and I love it! I won’t repeat what Apertome said. I like that you can set up groups. We have a group setup for our local mtb messageboard (Nashville Mountain Bike). This allows you to quickly view how much your friends are riding and be envious or scared at the starting line of the next race.
Try http://www.mapmyride.com. Excellent interface, easy to map and lots of routes!