Stupidly Simple Plain Text Running Log

Posted on 7th of November 2025

I’ve recently started revitalize my running hobby. Mainly due to the fact that I’ve gathered up some extra “unnecessary” kilos, so I’ve felt that I need to step up my aerobic exercises. Although, truth be told, I’ve never been too keen into that sort of exercises and have always preferred stuff like strength training etc. But I think now would be good time to start.

Of course, being the geek I am, I wanted to start tracking my practice in one form or another. Obviously, something like Strava is a very common solution for this and most likely if I end getting more “hooked” on this hobby, I’ll probably start using it more. But at the same time, I kinda would want to have something self-hosted for this, at least for sharing these to others.

I’ve always been a fan of “Plain Text X” type of solutions. Great example would be something like Plain Text Accounting, where something like Ledger is a commonly used software. So naturally, I wanted to have something similar for my running log.

For this purpose, I decided to go with a simple CSV file and gnuplot. Considering, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was to be able to share these. So naturally, something like HTML table and JS chart library could’ve done the trick. But at the same time, I kinda wanted to have some non-JS solution.

CSV Format for Runs

I decided to go with very simple structure for logging my runs. Essentially, I only cared about the date of the run, the length of the run and also the ability to give few words of notes about the run. In CSV, it could look something like:

date,distance_km,notes
2025-11-01,5.2,Morning jog
2025-11-03,7.5,Evening run
2025-11-05,10.0,Long run with hills

Adding new runs would also be simple as you can just manually edit the file or run something like:

echo "2025-11-06,6.3,Easy recovery run" >> runs.csv

Also if someone cares about this, in this format, it’s also easily version-controllable e.g. in Git.

Plotting the Runs

To get the plotting started, I just started with something simple:

set datafile separator comma
set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%d"
set format x "%m-%d"
set title "Running Distance Over Time"
set xlabel "Date"
set ylabel "Distance (km)"
set grid
set term pngcairo size 800,400
set output "runs.png"

plot "runs.csv" using 1:2 with linespoints title "Distance (km)" lw 2

and creating the plot itself:

$ gnuplot plot.gp

With the data defined above, it would result into something like this:

Of course, gnuplot offers a wide variety of different configurations for these plots, so you can go nuts with them. But at least for me, this is a good starting point.

Creating a Static Page for the Running Log

Lastly, I just wanted to generate some sort of HTML page from it, that I can just save to my server. I decided to just read through the CSV file and just create a HTML table out of that in a simple shell script format.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Generate chart
gnuplot plot.gp

# Start HTML
cat > index.html <<EOF
<!doctype html>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Running Log</title>
<style>
  table { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; }
  th { text-align: left; }
  th, td { border: 1px solid; padding: 0.4em; }
  img { display:block; margin:auto; max-width:100%; }
</style>
<h1>Running Log</h1>
<figure>
  <img src="runs.png" alt="Running chart" style="">
</figure>
<table>
  <tr><th>Date</th><th>Distance (km)</th><th>Notes</th></tr>
EOF

# Convert CSV rows to HTML table rows (skip header)
tail -n +2 runs.csv | while IFS=, read -r date dist note; do
  echo "  <tr><td>$date</td><td>$dist</td><td>$note</td></tr>" >> index.html
done

# End HTML
cat >> index.html <<EOF
</table>
EOF

And yes, that is a valid HTML, since you can omit optional tags in HTML5.

And there it is! Intentionally (or stupidly) simple. Only depedency being gnuplot. All data in simple plain text format, published in HTML. Of course, there are plenty of improvements that could be made like weekly/monthly summaries (this could be easily done with awk) or just creating different plots from the given data.