Working on “Exercise” Posts

I’ve been working on adding Exercise posts to my site. Mostly this is to “own my running” and not rely on Strava so much (See 🔖 Strava’s Big Changes Aim To Kill Off Apps, Canceling My Strava Premium, and “Strava requiring a premium account…”).

It’s kind of nice to think about what I really need from a running log. I have Strava and Garmin accounts, and there is just so much information from both of them.

I think what I really need is a way to track my time, distance, and race performances over time and a way to track my shoe mileage. That reduces the fields down to Start Date+Time, Duration, Distance, Notes, and Shoes.

I imagine I'll want to track more than just runs, which might just generalize Shoes to Gear for now.

Having lap data would be nice. And lift, weight, set, and rep data for strength training, too. But I think those are nice to haves instead of must haves to start.

I keep wondering if Gear should be a Post, too, or a new, non-Post, model. Neither Strava nor Garmin surface any Gear-related activity in their feeds. I’m fairly decided to have Gear be it’s own thing, especially since I want to do a particularly unique thing with it: summing the mileage from it’s related Exercise posts.

I also keep going back on forth if an Exercise post should have a name/title. Both Strava and Garmin require one. Occasionally I use the field, but I usually leave the default. I think generally anything I might want to put in a title could just as easily go in a notes field. I took a look at some physical run logs on Amazon, and none of them use titles.

Hopefully I’ll get it to a “usable enough” state soon.