Online workout journals

February 15, 2007 7:41 PM

I want a quirky way to log my exercise progress. I like the concept of walking to Rivendell, but I'm not a big Lord of the Rings fan.

I'm not looking for practical sites that give me statistics on my actual fitness, analyze my progress with respect to my diet, or anything useful like that: I want a fun front-end to supplement just writing down my numbers on a calendar or in a plain log. Does this exist?

posted by scission to sports, hobbies, & recreation (9 comments total)

Could you just do your own based on something you are interested in?

i.e. find some practical translator and then translate that to your own journey of interesting.

Oh, you could also google "walking to Rivendell" and do "find similar pages". :)

Were it me, I'd probably pick some Discworld related journey, what with Rincewind being flung around the disc so often.

Or maybe pick my favorite road trip from a movie.

Oh... how about LA to Las Vegas per Fear and Loathing? THAT would be fun. :) D.C. to San Francisco via Y The Last Man.
posted by smallerdemon at 9:42 PM on February 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Setting up a spreadsheet is probably your best bet for something as simple as you wish. Use an online spreadsheet if you want it world-accessible.
posted by Loto at 10:55 PM on February 15, 2007

a while back, i seem to remember reading about a guy who "rode" the tour de france on his exercise bike. he split the stages down into more manageable segments and marked his progress off each day. i thought that sounded like a fun way to take the edge off of a boring day at the gym.
posted by netsirk at 12:44 AM on February 16, 2007

I want a quirky way to log my exercise progress.

Could you walk to the moon or lift a pyramid (as a sum of your total distance or weight lifted over time)? I haven't done the calculations, so I have no idea how unrealistic these might be. Could you bench press a Volkswagen every day?

How about making something tangible that represents your progress? A tower or hill or string or plane or chain of something. If every mile you walked were a BB, how big would the BB heap be? If a mile were a toothpick, how tall would your toothpick tower stack? If walking a mile were a brick or tile, how big would your patio be? If a mile were a stanza about Tony Danza, how long would your Danziad be?
posted by pracowity at 1:30 AM on February 16, 2007

Try going around the circumference of the earth.
posted by god particle at 6:10 AM on February 16, 2007

If you're mainly focused on walking, I'd recommend WalkerTracker.com. They don't have anything as "quirky" as the walk to Rivendell, but it's got some nice charts and things and is certainly better than a spreadsheet or calendar. Plus, you've got the community aspect.
posted by srah at 6:52 AM on February 16, 2007

At my Y one year they had a map of the Boston Marathon -- just a cartoony map -- up on the wall. We signed up to "run" it, and then kept track of how muchaerobic exercise we did. Each half-hour of working out meant I could move my little flag X amount along the race route. Kinda corny, but I got a genuine feeling of satisfaction from finishing it.

I liked that I was racing other people -- can you get a friend to do it with you?
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:51 AM on February 16, 2007

I smell a Metafilter Project. I don't have the capacity to build it, but I smell it. The basic idea - tie a distance to some landmark, current, historical or fictional is so simple. You might circle the globe in time! Teams might walk to the moon!

I should have studied computers instead of stupid chemistry.
posted by nanojath at 10:36 AM on February 16, 2007 [2 favorites]

It would be a really good project - I wish I could make it, but I can't.

I calculated that if you ran 4 miles a day every single day, it would take you over 17 years to circle the globe, so it's a good long-term goal. You could do like the Rivendell thing and break it into more manageable chunks.

I second racing against other people, or at least a ghost racer.
posted by god particle at 1:09 PM on February 16, 2007