Sometimes encouragement isn’t all that encouraging.

The other day the exercise app on my phone that tracks my jogs informed me that my afternoon was my 49^th fastest run recorded for that particular distance.

The notification was written in a cheery shade of green and punctuated with an exclamation mark.

I’m not sure if that exclamation mark was mocking me or if it was being genuine in its excitement for my achievement, but either way it’s troubling.

Because being 49^th isn’t often something worth celebrating.

They don’t make ribbons for 49^th place. They make a first, a second, a third and then a generic “good try” ribbon. These “good on you for participating in the activities the Queensland curriculum forces you to take part in” ribbons used to be orange back in my ballgames carnival days. Then one year, they became multi-coloured metallic caterpillars. I’m not sure if this was because the Clifton cluster was suddenly allocated a bigger ribbon budget or if someone complained about orange being the colour of generic mediocrity, but we started getting these whizbang rainbow ribbons and they were honestly better than a boring blue first ones (read into that what you will and perhaps slip it into conversation at your next dinner party when you’re down to the meaty red wines and feel as though your conversation could solve all the world’s problems).

Sure they were pretty, but they meant nothing. And part of me feels as if this green exclamation of my personal running ranking was that patronising caterpillar deluding me into thinking I wasn’t a total failure.

Maybe it was just trying to acknowledge that I’d tried to be active instead of napping in a puddle of my own drool on the wrong end of my bed, like I’d rather have been doing at the time.

And that’s nice, isn’t it? It’s like a virtual cheerleader congratulating me for making good choices.

But, as always, I’m choosing to read more into this throwaway line than is probably necessary. Because if you’ve learned one thing after all this time you’ve wasted reading my overly-wordy dribble, it’s that I have the overthinking power to subvert something totally harmless into something sinister.

So I’ll start with something positive and slowly morph it into an affront.

If you were running in a race against hundreds of other people, coming 49th would be an achievement. Heck, even if you were racing against 49 other people, at least you creamed that one lazy sucker. As long as some other poor bastard went even slightly worse than you did, you’re doing alright. A victory is a victory, however small. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.

But this race wasn’t against anyone else.

It was a race against myself.

I was unwittingly racing previous, fitter versions of myself and didn’t even realise it.

So when you take this into account, this little green line of text was essentially a reminder that I had done a better job 48 other times. This notice might at first appear to be enthusiastically saying “well done” with its lime green hue, but the subtext was a much more of a deadpan, deeply sarcastic “well done”. If anything, it was more of an “oi you’re sloppy runner, a complete disappointment to yourself and you’ve really let yourself go” than anything else. It was a slap in the face, not a high five.

And I get it; if I’m coming in 49^th against myself, I probably do need a good slap somewhere.

Some people would suggest a positive outlook equals positive results. But in this case, my negative approach boded well. Because after my most recent run, I received a notification informing me that it was my 32^nd best. That’s progress.

Pessimism wins again.