Personal Informatics Needs for Amateur Athletic Coaching and Self-Coaching

Personal informatics applications and visualizations are increasingly available for amateur endurance athletes to record and monitor their performance and training. This information can be valuable for self-coached athletes or coaches of amateur athletes who tailor training programs based on this data. Despite this, it is not clear if the information provided by such tools map to the real needs of the amateur athletic community. To address this, we conducted in-depth interviews with eight amateur athletic coaches. Our results show that athlete-specific contextual factors such as injuries, illness, sleep, stress, and mood can be important to track and monitor in relation to performance-based metrics as they allow coaches to tailor training programs. Yet most commercially-available tools do not allow athletes to easily capture or analyse this information in relation to one another. It can also be challenging to share this information between athletes and coaches. This suggests that personal informatics applications could better serve the endurance athletic community by broadening the available data that can be recorded, shared, displayed, and analysed by self-coached athletes or coaches. Keywords: Athletes, personal informatics, sports, physical activity, self-improvement, coaching, reflection, awareness. Index Terms: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces–User Centered Design; H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Collaborative computing