Forty years ago I was a fairly decent bicycle racer. Early one spring I went to a local training ride. Now anybody is allowed to join these rides, so it was my practice to go extremely hard for the first mile or two, just to get rid of the less skilled riders, because allowing them to hang around was dangerous.
This particular day I did my usual fast start, leaving everybody strung out behind me. After a couple of minutes I slowed down to let whoever was left in the group catch their breath. But then I changed my mind and decided to go hard again, but this time nobody tried to keep up, they just let me go. So when I got to about 200 meters ahead I slowed down to see if anybody was going to come out and join me, but nobody did. But then a few miles later I look back to see a girl chasing me. All of those supposedly fast guys back there and the only one to come out to chase me is a girl.
Normally upon seeing that I would just pick up the pace and say bye-bye, but this time I thought 'I gotta see this'. Sure enuf she kept coming and to my amazement she caught me. Then of all the chutzpah, she came around and took a pull, and I thought dang girl, that's impressive. Then she fell back to the pack again, and eventually some guy came out to join me, but what that girl did was impressive.
After the ride was over we all gathered in the parking lot to chat before heading home, and the girl was there. Of course I didn't say anything to her because I'm a very shy guy. A few weeks after that I had to head out west to get my season started and I didn't get back to town until June. At which time I went for a ride with some of my buddies, and we talked about what'd been happening while I was gone, and how everybody's season was going. After a while we were ready to split up and head home when one of them asked me, 'Hey, do you remember that girl?', I smiled and said yup! Then he said, 'her boyfriend broke up with her... she committed suicide.' Those words hit me like a ton of bricks, and I've never been able to get it out of my mind that I should've said something to her. I should've told her how impressed I was. I'll never know if it would've made any difference, but I should've said something.
From that day on I vowed that if anybody ever does anything worth commending, I'm gonna say something. I don't care if it's the cashier at the store being able to count change correctly, or some guy in a call center in India patiently assisting me with a complaint, although he probably doesn't understand me any better than I understand him. If it impresses me, I'm telling 'em.
I figured that this was a story worth telling because it's better to learn this lesson here, than the way I did.