A training diary can be your best friend. What you decide to log down in your training diary depends on what you hope to achieve through running. If you aim to loose weight, you may record the calories you've burned each week, or pounds each month. If you are training for your first marathon, you may be more concerned with your MPW and long runs.

Over time, it is intresting to see how you have progressed. For beginners, it can be motivation to keep going when you quite simply, can't be assed or need to reassess your goals. After a few years of running, it may also help with injury prevention, you can see where you went wrong - and you may find you have ran too fast or too far. Your diary may also become a personal training guide after you've run a few races. You can see when you preformed you last Personal Best (PB) and go back a few weeks in your diary to follow the training from there as a plan.

Here is a sample training plan a fellow running partner donated, although some personal details have been deleted, it should act as a fairly good model for you to follow:

Running Diary

You can find running sites on the internet that allow you to keep your own diary online. However, if the server goes down, so does your diary. CoolRunning.Com allows you to keep a diary along with some other websites, a quick Google will bring up a good few hits for you to explore. As another option, you can buy programs to do the job for you.