It's a good illustration if you're optimizing by pushing one variable – running harder. It's not a good illustration in general. Consider my case, which is analogous to yours:

My overall goals are health, fitness and wellbeing (as I assume yours is). And I lift weights, for example doing Turkish Get-Ups with a kettlebell. I started this with no weights, then increased to 12 kg, 16 kg, 20 kg. So my metric is weight x sets. Whenever I increased weight, I got injuries/pains. – First an irritated muscle under my shoulder blade, then pains around my thoracic spine, then a muscle on the outside of my shoulder that felt like it was getting pulled.

I could have said that I'm pushing myself too hard and decided to stay at the old weight. Instead I turned other knobs: I improved my warm-up, did some mobilizations and fixed my form, even booking a personal trainer/physiotherapist a few times. Similar things happened with every weighted exercise I'm doing. It's just hard to move correctly. Increasing the load (weight, speed etc.) exposes your faults. Then you fix them.

So optimizing my metrics brought me towards my overall goals, continuing to optimize started to bring me away from them, but still continuing to optimize (by taking different actions) brought me even closer to them: greater load plus more correct movements are part of health, fitness, wellbeing.

Venkat talks about this in his mediocrity sequence, that kakonomics are a kind of defense against goodharting yourself in the tails since tails diverge.