The best race you can run

     Sometimes the best race you can run is one you can't quite win.

     We just got home from a beach vacation, a long weekend of swimming and sand and sleeping late, of eating seafood every night and shaking sand out of beach towels, clothes, and hair. Saturday afternoon, after a short swim, I lazed in a chair by ocean's edge to enjoy the mild setting sun and the crash of wave on shore and the tang of the salt air.
    The clientele at this condo was predominantly families, and most of the people on the beach were parents with small kids. About a hundred yards away was a family playing by water's edge. Father, mother, daughter, doing the usual things with little plastic pails and shovels and sand.
    After she got tired of digging in the sand, the daughter decided to challenge Dad to a race. Dad had the look of a long-distance runner, lean and long-legged and skinny, with the scruffy beard and various tattoos of a hipster. I guess even hipsters have kids sometimes. The daughter was about eight or nine and still had the pudgy torso and short legs of childhood. Mom counted down (on your mark....get set...go!!) with admirable enthusiasm, and off they dashed, just a short way down the beach.
     They raced in the opposite direction, away from my vantage point rather than towards it, so I didn't see their faces as they ran. All I saw were the smooth strides of the father and the awkward, churning gait of the little girl as they paced each other.
     You know how the race came out. Somehow she pulled ahead of her daddy at the very end, won the race even though it looked as if every arm-pumping stride she took was off-balance. Somehow, by a mysterious process known to all parents,  she overtook his economical graceful gait with a burst of energy and won with the slimmest of margins.
     From my seat, I could only see their backs.
 
     Until they turned around to run back to mom. The little girl was laughing and squealing in triumph, her face lit up with the thrill of the race and her victory. Such a grin (ear-to-ear!!) I think we only see on the faces of the very young....or the very innocent.
     But Dad looked EVEN MORE like he had just won the race.
     And I really think he did. And I wonder if when he was a little boy, just starting to find out the strength in his own legs, he challenged his father to a footrace. If in the time-honored tradition, he also somehow outran his father. If in his own unearned but oh-so-deserved win he too had been encouraged to run and run and run, to set his mark high and strive for the mountaintops.
    Nothing succeeds like success or just a taste of victory, a few steps gained on an understanding parent who knows that unexpected victory may strengthen and embolden the young or the weak to greater achievement and fulfillment.

   Sometimes the best race you can run is one you can't quite win.