Answer :
With Sally's goal to be place third or better, she can determine if she is making progress toward her goal by can monitor her practice run times to see if they are decreasing. In this way she can monitor her progress and also to determine if her goal is almost achievable.
She can monitor her practice run times to see if they are decreasing. While training for a race, it is important know where your performance currently lies in relation to where you want your performance to be. This can be easily done by recording the time she takes during her practice run and then training harder to reduce this time during her buildup to the race.