Documenting bike rides - how to keep track of every single ride

Why document bike rides at all?

Most people set off, come back - and that's it. A shame, because a few notes per ride pay off many times over across the season. You see how your fitness develops, rediscover great routes, remember the ride with the tailwind and the one with the puncture just before the finish. And at the end of the year you have an honest tally instead of a vague feeling.

Documenting is something different from tracking. A tracking app records the route via GPS. Documenting means deliberately capturing and putting the ride into context - with the things no GPS signal picks up. What was the weather really like? Who were you riding with? How did the new bike feel?

Which data is really worth it?

Not everything needs to be recorded. Turn every ride into a chore and you'll soon stop again. These fields have proven to be a sensible foundation:

• Date and route - the bare minimum. When, how far.
• Duration and elevation gain - makes rides comparable.
• Weather and conditions - rain, wind, heat. Explains later why a ride felt tough.
• Companions - who you were out with.
• Bike - road bike, MTB, gravel. So you can analyse per bike later.
• A rating or a remark - a sentence or two on how the ride was. That's often the most valuable part.

The usual ways - and their limits

Notebook or calendar. Nicely analogue, but impossible to analyse. You can't just check how many kilometres you rode in May without adding it all up.

Excel spreadsheet. Better already, because it can do the maths. But keeping it up is tedious: entering something on the go on your smartphone is a pain, photos don't fit in it, and after three years the spreadsheet is a sprawling monster.

Strava, Komoot and co. Strong at recording and navigating - but weak as a diary. They're built around routes and performance, not around capturing and rating individual rides. Ratings like "headwind, lovely all the same" or "first test of the new tyres" have no place there. More on this in the article What Strava can't do.

A diary for all your rides - here's the easier way

That's exactly the gap Tourtagebuch is made for: a digital tour diary where you capture every ride with precisely the fields that matter to you. Only the three genuinely necessary fields are mandatory, everything else is optional. At your desk in the browser, out and about as an app on your smartphone - the same rides, automatically in sync.

• Record rides with date, distance, duration, elevation gain, weather, companions and a rating.
• Photos straight onto the ride - even offline, they upload once you're back in range.
• Take over existing routes via GPX import instead of typing everything in.
• Analyses per year, season and bike - including personal bests.
• Filters and search, so you'll find every ride again even years later.

And because many people don't only cycle: hiking, running, motorcycling, canoeing or cross-country skiing all land in the same diary. One account, all sports.

In a nutshell

Documenting bike rides takes a minute per ride and gives you a real overview across the season: kilometres ridden, favourite routes, memories. Notebooks and Excel quickly hit their limits, and pure tracking apps aren't built for this. A digital tour diary combines both - fast capture on the go and analysable data at the end of the year.