You know the story. Some runners from Jamaica decide to enter as a bobsled team for the Olympics. Their coach is John Candy, himself a disgraced Olympian, and through a series of mishaps, slapstick adventures, and silly antics, they find themselves with a broken bobsled at the end of race. But they still finish it. Tears, joy, laughter, it’s better than Cats.
There is one moment, however, from this movie that has always stayed with me. John Candy says to one of the runners something along these lines (and I paraphrase), “If you’re not enough without the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”
I’ve always wondered about that, what it feels like to win a gold medal. And what does it feel like AFTER you’ve won the gold medal?
I didn’t win a gold medal recently, but I did run a half marathon last Saturday. It was my first half marathon, and I really really wanted to do it. I was driven to do it like I’d never been driven to anything else. I did it because I felt like I had something to prove about my body. Not really to anybody else (although my husband admits he likes my runner’s legs), but to myself, that my body still has some juice left in it, and that I can still ask things of it, and that it will still deliver.
It did deliver. I finished the race. I didn’t exactly do it in record time, but I sprinted the last mile and a half, and my husband tells me I was grinning as I crossed the finish line. I felt great.
But when I got home, the laundry was still waiting. My children still needed to be fed. My parents, who had stayed with my family as DH and I ran our race, were lovely and helpful and let us take naps, but then they left. And life shifted back to normal. Not a thing had changed. I was still the same person with the same problems as before. I just had sore knees and better defined calves.
Then John Candy’s face floated to my mind, and I heard him tell his Jamaican bobsledder, “If you’re not enough without the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”
Let me also just say, quickly, that was the first, and hopefully LAST time an image of John Candy has come to my mind unbidden.
It made me wonder about the goals I set in my life. I’m glad I set my goal to run a half marathon, and I will always have that, even when my calves ( as is inevitably the case) lose their new-found definition. But perhaps there are other goals I should be setting, ones that WILL change my life, ones that will make me enough without the medal.
What kind of goals have you met in your life, and how have they changed you? Do you sometimes feel a let down after a goal has been accomplished? What kind of goals can have an impact on our fundamental nature?
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