...but no place to correlate it all.

Yet.

Since my blood glucose checks do not follow the logbook-standard "pre-meal/pre-snack" schedule, most logbooks are... useless. My go-to is an Excel spreadsheet in which I manually log time, blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, and comments on what I've done or eaten. Another sheet in the workbook tracks my weight, a third, aggregate nutritional information, and a fourth, lab results. Now that I've finally got the right drivers to upload my Freestyle meters to my Vista-64 computer, I can also get some baseline blood glucose analysis through Abbott's Co-Pilot software.

While Co-Pilot does allow the manual input of meal information, the information and interface -- as with most meter-focused software -- is limited and tedious. Since MyNATS went offline a few years ago, I've been getting my nutritional intake information through The Daily Plate, a service of Livestrong.com. While The Daily Plate doesn't have everything I need, it does let me add foods and (for the most part) calculate nutritional information by gram weight. It also parses out sodium and the major macronutrients, and -- with a paid subscription -- allows me to log "from the road".

Livestrong.com also allows me to log my exercise using a basic database of activities, estimating caloric expenditure based on my weight, and calculating walk/run/cycling distance using "Livestrong Loops". Unfortunately, the site has some really strange ideas of what roads do and don't go where, and the estimated energy expenditure for aerobic exercise does not always match up with the results from my Polar F6 heart rate monitor. On the other hand, it does concatenate my exercise with my food intake and adjusts its recommended caloric intake to match my weight and my additional energy expenditures. I use Map My Ride (a separate service of Map My Fitness LLC) for more granular information on heart rate and speed. It could capture more information if I had a more sophisticated cycling computer, but it does not have any provision to log in food intake or body metrics beyond heart rate. Polar Personal Trainer captures the exercise data from my F6 and allows me to manually add some basic information about each session. If it's available, I'll copy in the distance from my Cateye cycling computer (since that measurement is based on the exact number of rotations of my front wheel), or the display on gym-based cardio equipment. Some of the higher-end Polar systems will automatically capture distance, cadence, and a continuous heartrate feed, but those cost several hundred dollars which I do not have right now.

The biggest limitation is that none of these systems allows me to capture all of my body metrics, food intake, and workout data, and analyze them interactively. MapMyRide doesn't log foods; The Daily Plate doesn't have a training-log view (and I often have to tweak the "duration" of a session to accurately record caloric expenditure). Neither correlates back to blood glucose level, blood pressure, or hydration levels.

Without large, continuous quantities of multivariable data (heart rate, blood glucose, blood pressure, power output, etc.), the best I can get is "anecdotal" data. One-offs, two-offs, even three-offs, do not a pattern make. For someone whose living does not depend on shaving fractions of seconds off a time-trial, and whose diabetes does not warrant a CGM, the cost of recording tools -- and the time needed to correlate their data into "something that makes sense" -- is arguably overkill. Over time, though, the anecdotal data -- if carefully logged -- can provide useful training and trending information. Then again, should I really put on the brakes every 15 or 30 minutes into a session, every session, just to gather biometric data (which will of course be skewed because I did, indeed, stop to test)?

I have learned (over many sessions on a treadmill) that as an exercise session progresses, my heart rate will rise, even over a steady level of exertion. I expect that is related to muscle fatigue (and possibly carb utilization) rather than hydration, though some post-exercise low blood pressure readings this summer ended up resolving themselves when I increased in-session hydration and electrolyte replacement.

Unfortunately, without a single place to put all the readings and information side-by-side-by-side-by-side, it's almost as much a guess as not having the data at all.

In any case, it would be nice to not have to log my numbers in four different places just to have the vaguest sense of tracking anything.