Why I Stopped Using a Spreadsheet to Plan My Triathlon Season
by The Next Race
For two years I ran my training out of a Google Sheet.
It was a good spreadsheet, by the standards of triathlete spreadsheets. Colour-coded by discipline. Tabs for each training block. A formula that calculated weekly TSS — training stress score — from manual inputs. A separate tab for race results with finishing times and split data going back to my first sprint in 2021.
It took about forty minutes a week to maintain. I told myself it was worth it. That maintaining the spreadsheet was part of the process. That the act of logging was itself useful.
It wasn't. Or rather — it was useful, but the spreadsheet was not the right tool for it.
What the spreadsheet couldn't do
It couldn't tell me anything about the relationship between what I'd done in the past and what I should do next. I had two years of data in that document, and I had no way of asking it a question. I couldn't look at my October race results and work backwards to understand what the preceding eight weeks of training looked like when I performed well versus when I didn't.
The data was stored. It wasn't connected to anything.
When I started building a new training plan — which I did every January, with the full optimism of someone who has forgotten how January ended the previous year — I built it from intuition and internet plans and a vague sense of what had worked before. The information to do it better was sitting in the spreadsheet. I just couldn't access it.
The moment that changed it
I had a bad race in June. Not a disaster — I finished, I was fine — but significantly off my target time and off my recent training performances. I couldn't explain it.
I went back through the spreadsheet and tried to piece together what the six weeks before the race had looked like. It took me about an hour. I was manually scrolling, doing arithmetic in my head, trying to reconstruct a picture of my training load from rows of individual session data.
What I eventually found: I'd significantly over-loaded in weeks three and four of the build phase. More volume than my previous cycles had ever included. And I'd done it without noticing because I was tracking each session individually, not watching the cumulative trend.
The spreadsheet showed me every tree. It never showed me the forest.
What I use now
I moved to The Next Race. The migration took about an hour — most of my Strava data came across automatically, and the race results I'd logged manually in the spreadsheet took another 20 minutes to add.
What I noticed immediately: I could see my training history as a continuous picture rather than a series of disconnected entries. When I started building my next training plan, I could look at what I'd actually done in the months before my best races and use that as the template, rather than starting from a generic 16-week plan and trying to make it fit.
The sessions I'd logged going back years weren't just records anymore. They were inputs.
What changed about the actual training
Two things.
I stopped over-loading in build phases. Not because I became more disciplined — because I could see the load accumulating in real time rather than reconstructing it after the fact. It's the difference between watching your speed on a dashboard and trying to calculate it from memory.
I got better at tapering. I'd always found the taper psychologically difficult — the drop in volume felt like detraining, and I'd often add sessions that weren't in the plan. Now I could look at what my taper had looked like before my best race and use it as a reference point. The data made the case more convincingly than my own discipline.
The honest version
I'm not saying a spreadsheet can't work. I know athletes who run tight, effective spreadsheets and race well. The tool is less important than the discipline of consistent, honest tracking.
But most of us are not those athletes. Most of us have a spreadsheet that's 60% complete, three tabs we stopped updating in August, and a formula that throws an error when the year changes.
If that's where you are — and it's where I was — the issue isn't discipline. The issue is that the tool is making the job harder than it needs to be. Good tools make the right behaviour easy. Bad tools make it possible if you try very hard.
The data you accumulate over years of racing is genuinely valuable. You've earned it through thousands of hours of training. The question is whether the tool you're using lets you use it.