SportTracks Fitness Software Review
While my Garmin Edge 705 has proven to be a very valuable and useful bit of hardware, the training analysis software (Garmin Training Center) that came with the device has proven to be... less useful. As a data analysis package, it is really very basic and not really up to the task of a serious analysis effort.
Instead, my preferred software is SportTracks. SportTracks can talk directly to the Edge 705, and it has a far larger array of features. In addition, it has an open plug-in API and a number of third-party developers have written plugins to extend its functionality. Plus, being based on Microsoft's .Net platform, it works on Windows and Linux.
Using the software, one can perform analysis on individual activities, plus on aggregates of multiple activities. It acts as both analysis software (similar to packages like DLOG99 for the race car) but also as a training diary so one can see long-term trends and summaries.
Here is a recent attempt at the Black Oak Mountain Bike Time Trail course, showing heart rate throughout the lap:
This shows a summary of the cycling mileage accumulated, by month:
And here is the Training Load plugin, which performs Training Impulse analysis, which is a measure of current fitness and fatigue based on the accumulated load of subsequent events. (The leftmost spike is the MS Bike Tour; the centre spike is the four-hour "8 Creekin' Hours" race at Two Creeks)
All of this record keeping and analysis has proven to be very useful, and the drive to exceed the previous month's and year's mileage has been a major motivator.
SportTrack's one major flaw though is that it has no real concept of "laps" within an event as an object. It recognises and records split times from the Edge 705 lap counter, but it has no built-in mechanism to overlay multiple laps within an event, or to overlay laps from different events. There is, for example, no way to find the fastest lap over a given course. (A third-party plugin can find time/distance records - for example, your fastest 10km - but not a lap of a course/track). In this, it differs greatly from motorsports analysis software, which deals heavily in comparing lap-to-lap performance. One hopes that this functionality will be added in a future version.
I'm particularly intrigued by possibilities of power analysis, but as I currently lack a power meter, that will have to wait for another day.
Overall, this is a very powerful package, and it beats the pants off Garmin Training Center. Very highly recommended.