Before the days of GPS, or even Map Quest, to get from point A to point B you needed to pull out a road map and determine which road to take. With Jim Bishop's castle, he had a plan... a miniature model to be his guide. Once you have a plan and get down to work, how do you know what kind of progress you are making?

With the GPS unit, it will draw the lines in your desired path and give you feedback on how many more miles and minutes remain. It can be more difficult in your running, but some tools can help make it easier, more meaningful and more fun.

When it comes to running fast, you usually need to know how far you go and how much time it takes you. The new GPS watches will tell you both for your daily training, and calculate your pace as well. If you don't have access to that, then you can use a car to measure certain distances, but you will still need some sort of watch. Without some timing device, you will not know how much faster you are getting.

But now let's take a look at the bigger picture. If you decide you need to run 400 miles during the summer for your off season, chop your goal down to smaller units to measure, so it seems easier to achieve. Set weekly goals to measure your progress. Some days, you will feel like you are making now progress at all, but if you measure accurately and look at weeks or months to see your progress, you will see great things happen.

For those that have a technical aptitude, there is an off-season training spreadsheet in excel that will help you define weekly goals and monitor your progress. Have fun creating your own creative ways to track your progress as well.

I am sure that if you drove past the castle each day and saw it from the highway, you probably could not tell the difference from one day to the next. So it may be in your own training. So value and reward your improvement on a weekly or monthly basis to see your progress from a bigger perspective.