On Goals and Motivation By Justin Freeman Saab/Salomon Factory Team Something strange happened to me this August. In the spring I had set the ambitious goal of running 14:50 or better for five kilometers. On August 14th I ran this exact time, a two second PR and the fastest ever 5 km by a 31-year-old New Hampshire resident on New Hampshire soil (yes, someone really keeps track of such statistics). This was actually the first time since college that I had achieved my season’s big goal in such a clear-cut way. Even when I went to the Olympics (which is admittedly a slightly bigger deal than setting a single-age state record) my bigger goals – top 20 in an individual race, a good leg in the relay – turned out to be far beyond my grasp. And so when I woke up on August 15th, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. I was not in the by now seemingly normal position of trying to figure out what went wrong or how I could fix it, or of ignoring this conundrum and just going out hard and long...