18 February, 2012

Swimming pool etiquette?

I go swimming twice a week. I’m reasonably fast, but not very, and I don’t like being confined, so I generally swim in the open half of the pool and steer clear of the lanes. I have two observations to make about my local pool:

The open half seems, at certain times of the day, to be dominated by overweight women of a certain age who insist on swimming along very slowly side by side, chatting. Since they take up the whole of the available width, they prevent anyone from (a) swimming at a reasonable speed and (b) overtaking them.

And these people actually look surprised when you very politely say ‘excuse me’ and try to squeeze past them.

I have on occasion been forced by the situation above into the lanes. On these occasions I choose to swim in the ‘medium’ lane, since the ‘slow’ lane is far too slow for me and the ‘fast’ lane is far too fast. Yet, invariably, there is one fast-lane fugitive in the medium lane who insists on irritating everyone by (a) splashing wildly when overtaking and (b) almost knocking others out when s/he executes an unnecessarily show-off underwater turn at the end of each length.

Swimming pool etiquette, anyone?

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