Weeeeee-eaving

I don't mind that this is taking a little time.  Ok, it's actually taking a lot of time.  I haven't made a post in a few days because I've been doing a lot of "behind the scenes" work.  My information is slowly coming together.  I'm really enjoying the weaving phase, albeit slight anxiety about running out of time.  As Professor Lamb mentions on her Virtual Inquiry site, "For many students, weaving ideas together is the most difficult stage. In many cases, students are running out of time as they put together their project. Rather than weaving a fine fabric, they create a quilt of unrelated pieces of information."  I'm trying really hard not to rush.  My goal is to create a purposeful tool that's more like a beautifully woven scarf instead of a patchwork quilt.  So it's fair to say I'm also Wrapping because it's constantly in the back of my mind what this entire scarf will look like at the end.  If I'm synthesizing all of this information, where's it headed?  What kinds of formats, templates, tools, diagrams, etc. should I be using?

I'll tell you what I've been up to.  I picked two areas to weave first: training and motivation.  I was really confident that my research on training was complete and so that's where I started.  Initially I pulled up all the sites for training plans that I had saved in Delicious.  Yikes.  Toggling back and forth/ minimizing/ switching Explorer tabs wasn't working for me.  I printed off the pages from the sites that contained various training plans.  They were neatly arranged on my dining room table and I went to work analyzing.  Analysis included:

• Which plans seem to make the most sense for me?
• What aspects of each plan do I like?  Not like?

I liked that one plan offered the option of "Doubles" during the week: Thursday & Friday were lumped together and you could run the miles one day, spread them out over the two/doubled days, or choose to do cardio instead.  I kept the aspect of that plan.  Next, I noticed that all plans gave runners at least 2 days off a week and since it was such a common practice, I decided I would honor that in my plan.  One of the plans showed a final column of total miles run during the week.  Love it, it's going into my plan.  I think it will help with motivation.  I studied the terminology from a few of the plans and decided it didn't really matter what I ended up using since it's my plan and needs to make sense to me. 

I realized my decisions were getting ahead of me and I needed to start tracking them.  An Excel spreadsheet seemed to make the most sense to illustrate my carefully woven training plan.  This spreadsheet took a lot of TIME.  Cells were arranged, reformatted, copied, deleted, moved, modified.  I also realized I had to go back to WEBBING and obtain some more information on races I might run during my training.  Whew!  My spreadsheet is finally finished.  I have a training plan.  It's MY plan and I'm feeling really proud and excited.

My personal inquiry project has four components: training, fuel, gear, and motivation.  I've finished Weaving the first one, now on to finishing the other 3 (which are works in progress).