Insulting compliments

[pinkbikes]

I am guilty of all this (and more I'm sure)...

I often offer encouragement when I pass somebody ("come on - you're doing great") even if they are probably not doing great but I just want to give them a little boost along.

I am often told by people passing me "come on - you're doing great" when I am probably not either! And I know I'm not doing great (by somebody else's yardstick anyway) but I'm doing whatever I can and I take their possibly insulting compliment and I thank them for it, because I genuinely expect that they are trying hard to be encouraging and it does give me little boost even if I know it's crap!

The one that probably really WAS an insulting compliment I could only laugh at. I was recently at a cross country triathlon. You swim in a dam, ride MTB and run cross country. I often do this event series in a team, usually as the swimmer because none of my team mates can swim for crumpets and I'm pretty decent. All that buoyancy has to count for something!

So this particular event, the date had been changed and my team hadn't entered, but the night before I got a plea to fill in from a team who had lost their swimmer to a medical issue. I was actually in training for an adventure race a week later (where I was ocean swimming and MTBing) so happily agreed thinking it would be a nice training hit-out. And since I'd serviced my MTB I decided to ride it out to the start to see if all was "just so."

So after the event, where I swam quite handily, I was standing around in my cycling kit ready to ride back out, and noticed a sweet and fit-looking young thing struggling to carry her bike and step over some bunting. So I held the bunting down for her to step over.

And here comes the insulting compliment... She smiled, thanked me and said "So how was it spectating today?" Ok - so not sure there was even a compliment!

So, since my jersey was covering up my loudly-numbered arms, and even though I was in riding kit, I was obviously not athletic-looking enough to have been a competitor!

I just laughed. She's young. Her paradigms haven't shifted yet!