I went back to the gym today, and it was fine. It is going to take me a while to get an unassisted pull-up, but I am nibbling away at the amount of assist I need. Joe advised me to tweak my bar placement while squatting, and it feels a lot more stable now. I benched more today than I've benched before, and when I cautiously bumped up the weight for French press it felt exactly right.
In the middle of all this, I overheard a man talking to a younger woman as she returned a pair of 30-pound dumbbells to the rack. He said, "That's a lot of weight for a girl!" I limited myself to a horrified look in response, but I have been thinking about it ever since. I wanted to say, "Hey, buddy, don't pretend to pay someone a compliment while asserting your own superiority-- and, by the way, the word you want there is 'woman.'" I wanted to say, "What if someone said to you, 'Hey, you're not bad-looking for a hairy old man'?" Or even "Gosh, that's a long sentence for a man!"
I know that two wrongs don't make a right, and that men are perfectly capable of complex syntax. But I don't know what kind of response might have sent the message I wanted him to hear. The woman in question didn't seem terribly rattled by it. She said, "That's kind of insulting," and he tried to shrug it off.
The gym is a weird place. What would you have wanted to say -- zingy, charitable, or in between?
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