Hi, I'm Debbie Boyle's coach at Mojo for Running, and today's podcast is about keeping a record of your running, a daily running journal.

Do you do that now? If you don't, it's January now. Why not make that a New Year's resolution to keep an accurate journal of all your running activities in 2012?

Here today, I'm going to give you some ideas of things that you should or you might want to consider including in that journal,

and I'll try to give you some idea of why those could make a difference for you.

Let's say you're making your journal entry for today.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how did you feel?

How did you sleep the night before?

Or last night?

How many hours and how well?

If you didn't have a great run, this alone could be the cause.

And sometimes looking at these kinds of things and keeping track of it from day to day will help

you understand that. And sometimes like you might not even be thinking at 6 o'clock in the

afternoon when you have a lousy run that, oh yeah, I only slept five hours last night.

So sometimes this kind of thing can be helpful.

What did you eat or not eat before running?

Were you properly hydrated?

Again, these kinds of things will help you understand why you had the kind of run you had.

Did you consume any gels on your run? If you had a long run, or particularly, if it was a long and hot run, did you consume any

electrolytes? Of course, those would be the gels I just mentioned, but also it could be, say, electrolyte drinks.

If you're running in hot weather and or if you're doing long runs, you need to be using your

body as a textbook, testing different foods, ghoul, goos, and electrolyte replacement products

to see how your body responds.

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