“GR8 Fran Time, BTW”

Love the articles feature of the many options for tracking. Before I found my online tracker, I was using an excel spreadsheet I made up that had all the benchmarks. I input a date, and the result. This was good, but it was not ideal, because I couldn't track every workout. Only the major ones.

I have been on 'beyond the whiteboard' for about a month or so, and I love it. Very easy to use and it has a ton of features. The graphics that show breakdowns of wod times, etc are pretty cool. When they start to charge $3 a month for their service, I think that I will most likely go for it. You can tell that the Kinnicks definitely put a lot of time into their website and the small fee, in my view, can't make much of a profit. It would instead ensure that their computers can keep on running as the site grows.

Another Crossfit tracker that's not mentioned in the article is statulo.us. I built it about a year ago, and it's grown to almost 500 users.

Unique features of statulo.us are:
* Graphs of your personal performance for each WOD category, over time
* Milestone tracking (graphs compare modalities and levels)
* Gym log: a single log stream that groups all of your gym members together in one spot

Congrats to the folks building these trackers! I think these online communities continue to add to the growth and interactiveness of our community as a whole.

cheers,
b

This sounds interesting, and I will have to check it out. I have been tracking my workouts in a (pen and paper) journal, and we post times and workouts for a few of us in our little gym (law enforcement academy gym), and even that has been helpful.

Seeing the times on the main WOD site are okay, but I don't know or workout with those folks. Tracking times with folks that I know, whether I am competing directly with them or not, kind of means we are travelling the path together, and makes it easier to push my guts out on a workout.

Another option is www.logwod.com/gym. It was written specifically for crossfit affiliates. It's ugly (I can say that, I wrote it), but focused on simplicity and ease of use. When displayed on a computer in the gym, the affiliate owner logs in once. Their athletes can view their history, enter their scores, and view everyone else's score for the WOD without each person logging in separately. There's also a home login option. Non-affiliated athletes can of course use the home version at www.logwod.com.

It's free for both gym and home use. We have 500 users registered and about 15,000 workouts logged.

And yet another logging tool is the AthleticsLog

http://www.athleticslog.com

It's been around for 4 years, calculates work and power output for any workout that you record. Has every homepage WOD registered since March of 2005, has administration tools for trainers and facility owners. Thousands of users already registered.

My brother and I, both User Experience Designers for guidebook company Lonely Planet(.com) have been talking about what would make the ultimate online logging tool for CrossFit for a little over a year now. There were a couple of early alpha releases and we even approached HQ about using the name 'CrossFit Tools' before we decided to quit shortly after the CF Strength Bias article.

Here's why:

There's a natural tension between raw performance data and the community discussion that frames it (or vice versa). Behind that there's an underlying issue of the main site's comments' inability to scale up to deal with the volume of posting - of both discussion and data.

In the Strength Bias article, Jeff mentions that Bingo's pet project is getting people to return to logging their WODs in the main site comments because it fosters the global CF community. I think that's very true.

So what do we do? The obvious thing is to separate the performance data from the discussion - let people log their WODs in LogsItAll, Beyond The Whiteboard or whatever tool they prefer and keep the main site comments for discussion. There are two down-sides to that. Firstly we lose the discussion that comes from the data - the comments on unbelievably fast (or amazingly gruelling) workouts and their corresponding notes, cheers, jeers and queries. Secondly, we lose our absolute point of reference. Where you want to log your data depends not just on how good the logging tool is, but who uses it. Personally, I want an absolute reference. I want to know how I stand compared to my last effort, compared to my gym buddies, compared to people in my home town, and just for kicks (and equally importantly), compared to Speal, OPT, Dutch, Boz, Annie, Nicole, Jillian and B.

For these reasons we concluded that the tool which will ultimately take the crown as the place to log your data, has to be crossfit.com. We still have ideas about how to run data logging and community together and about how to make it fun and easy, and about how visualisation dovetails with motivation and analysis. What's changed is that we're now convinced that this type of tool belongs at the heart of CrossFit, hosted on CrossFit.com and developed in collaboration with the greater CrossFit community to tie us all back into one data-logging, performance-chasing community.