Other Swimmers

I like to go swimming from time-to-time, and my nearest pool and leisure centre is in the heart of the city.  I’ve never been a member, I don’t have that level of optimism, I pay as I go and sometimes, I go before work. Every time I do it though, I wonder if my main motivation might be so that I can tell friends and colleagues about it afterwards.

“Wow, I went for a swim this morning, I feel incredibly alive and alert.  It really sets you up for the day!  Just going to eat my vegan-friendly-flapjack, now, with my fresh kale and orange juice.  Hashtag blessed”.

There is a self-selection lane system in our pool and you can choose between the fast, medium or casual lanes.  I always go in the casual lane because I like its name and the idea that there’s no real commitment.  Any minute, I might join the Pilates Class over in the studio, or even take-up Tai Chi.  A lot of people drastically over or under estimate their ability and efficiency in the water, and that’s when the lifeguards have to step-in.  I notice that it’s always the men swimmers who need to be demoted slightly and the women promoted up a lane or two.  I don’t know what that says about our society, but it says something.

It surely says something.

There’s a woman in our pool who wears a Wonder Woman swimming costume, complete with matching silver swim hat.  She’s definitely in her 40s, and sometimes I want to speak to her and ask her a load of questions, such as, what she thinks of the new Wonder Woman film and if she believes it’s a successful re-working of the feminist hero myth or not.  But it’s hard to do that when you’re doing laps.

There’s a man in our pool who doesn’t swim at all.  He just walks out as far as he can, until the water is up to his chin, and then he turns around and walks back again. He repeats this many times, but that’s not even the unusual bit.  The whole time he’s walking through the water, he’s talking.  Talking aloud!  Seemingly to himself, because no one is listening.  When a new swimmer comes into the pool area, this guy welcomes them, as if they’ve just arrived into a Hollywood 80’s pool party.

“Hi there Harvey, haven’t seen you in decades, come on in, the water’s fine”.

Harvey, or whatever his name actually is in reality, typically hurries into his chosen lane and starts swimming quickly, without making eye contact.  Swimmers are shy sometimes, I notice that.

There’s another one I watch and am intrigued by. He’s the one I call “Glasses Man” because he wears his eye-glasses in the water.  I could understand that, if you were taking it easy and doing a bit of breast stroke over in the casual lane, but this one always goes into the fast lane, and puts his head right under the water.

There’s this Brazilian couple who like to walk around the edge of the pool, kissing and canoodling, hand-in-hand.  It’s like they think they’re on vacation at the Copacabana and I half expect them to wave at me.  There’s a woman in a white and blue daisy swimming hat, who swims on her back, and sometimes hums along to the songs in her head.  She splashes and flaps around like how I imagine Zelda Fiztgerald might have swum.  In the sea, in the south of France.

There are people who use swimming aids, and they are fascinating to me.  Now I fully comprehend the need for floats and adult arm-bands, especially over in the casual lane.  We can all swim over there of course, in the sense that technically we don’t drown, but none of us are likely to be Olympic medal winners in the next little while.  But some people bring flippers, I mean really.  Flippers are part of diving gear and they have no place in the swimming pool!  There’s this one guy in our pool, who flies up and down the fast lane, and I feel like saying to him,

“Hey flipper fella, you’re cheating no one but yourself, how about taking those flippers off and seeing your real life speed instead?”

But I never do.  Like I said, it’s hard to speak when you’re swimming.

Some people do a complicated stretching routine before-hand, and bring litres of juices and coconut water to re-hydrate between laps.  While at the end of the spectrum there are those who do so little, you wonder why they just didn’t go to the coffee shop instead and have a giant cream bun and a hot chocolate.

The last time I went to our pool, “Glasses Man” was evicted after causing a pile-up in the fast lane.  He started shouting “you can’t make me, you can’t make me leave the pool!” and everyone was staring at him.  All of a sudden Walking Swimmer joined in, and started yelling from the other side of the pool to the lifeguard, “that’s right Paul, or Tony, you can’t make him move, this is his pool as much as anyone’s!”   And for a moment it seemed like Wonder Woman was going to say a few words too, but in fairness she was in the middle of a tricky set of Butterfly, so couldn’t really get involved.  In the end, Daisy Hat Woman started singing the French National Anthem, and I don’t know why, but that seemed to calm things down.

Glasses Man left the poolside and we all went back to our breathing and our own technique.  We listened to the silent emptiness of underwater swimming strokes, and we finished our laps.  We concentrated just on the rhythm of the pool water, and the unique sounds of all the other swimmers.