Baylor University: Training with TrainingPeaks

Peaksware has teamed up with the Baylor University Track and Field team and exercise physiologist Corey Hart to provide the worlds most complete fitness monitoring system. The system being implemented at Baylor consists of in-depth physiological testing, monitoring of every workout using a Garmin Forerunner 305, and then uploading the files to TrainingPeaks.com for communication and analysis of fitness trends over time, allowing the coaches to customize the training regimen for each athlete.

TrainingPeaks founder Dirk Friel visited Baylor University in Waco, Texas to discuss how the track and cross-country team can utilize TrainingPeaks technology to improve the team's performance this season. Dirk spent a day describing the benefits of training with technology, touring the campus, and meeting the athletes and coaches that will be involved with the project. In an interview with Dirk, Head Coach Todd Harbour describes how excited he is about the opportunities that this partnership brings to the team.

"We are extremely excited about the opportunity and just honored to be joining your team... last year, we ended up okay at the NCAA meet, but we almost didn't get there... So I said, you know, I need to look at opportunities and look at ways to make sure that I'm doing a good job of monitoring where they're at, and somebody told me about you guys and what you can do, and so that's kind of how it all started and it just went from there."

Under Coach Harbour's leadership, Baylor Universitys Track and Field team, home to recent Olympic medalists Jeremy Wariner, Reggie Witherspoon and Sanya Richards, has introduced the first web-based fitness monitoring system within collegiate running. Each member of the endurance track team tracks their workouts with a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS running watch. The Garmin watch keeps track of time, distance, pace, and heart rate and is then easily uploaded to TrainingPeaks.com where coaches review the data and plan future workouts.

Coach Harbour recognizes the benefits of having more concrete information to work with when coaching a large group of runners with varying needs. "Knowing when there's a potential that we need to slow down a little bit or back off, that's not always easy as a coach, you use your intuition, but if you've got some information to help you in that area, to make it a little more objective, that's great."

Exercise physiologist, Corey Hart, explains Baylor has introduced the most advanced fitness monitoring system in the country which has been proven to work. This same monitoring system has produced podium positions in the Tour de France and Olympic cycling events and will now be used for the first time with a collegiate running program. We will be monitoring daily fitness and fatigue in the hopes of creating top performances at the right times of the year.

The team will be tracking their progress by uploading their workout files to TrainingPeaks - check back for update reports, including data file analysis, on how they do throughout this fall's cross country season!

To download a PDF of this press release and read other press releases from Peaksware, go to www.Peaksware.com.