The Goal that Got Away

Today dawned sunny, beautiful, and a little chilly for this year's Purity's Moosic City 5K. Sam and his friend, Zack (who ran the 10k), finished well ahead of Lynnette and me. They waited for us and we finished the morning at Starbucks.

While we had done this race a before, today's course was a little different. We went on a trail high above the river. The winds were quite gusty, probably preventing us from a new personal record (at least that's my story).

As Lynnette and I were finally turning the corner for the final stretch, a man was standing there encouraging the runners. Actually, he was yelling for everyone to keep running (or in our case, to start running), and to catch up with somebody ahead. These words seemed to inspire us, so we picked up the pace. A few feet ahead of us was a guy with an American flag design on his shirt. Lynnette said to me, "Our goal is to catch up with him." We did quite well, until we were almost at his heels, when he decided to do the same thing, and pretty much left us behind. Lynnette's response was, "Okay, so we make a new goal." We kept running and finished.

Sometimes our goals don't quite work out the way we planned. The important thing is to make a new goal and keep going. After all, maybe the goals that get away aren't really supposed to be our goals anyway.