When I was a child – and well into my teenage years – I used to swim three nights a week as a member of my local swimming club. I represented the club in various local and regional galas, before the sheer volume of body hair I developed through puberty began to weigh me down in two ways: I became extremely self-conscious, but also it literally weighed me down and affected my finish times. Imagine trying to swim wrapped in a Persian rug. So, I chose to replace swimming with football for a short period, before this itself was usurped by sitting on my arse watching football instead.
Recently, however, I decided to don my goggles once again and bought a membership for the very centre I last frequented almost fifteen years ago. I’ve been trying to maintain a routine of swimming twice a week for nearly a year now, so I’m well qualified to offer the following observations on the peculiarities pertaining to pool life.
It starts with having to negotiate your way past Reception. If your centre, like mine, has been bought from your local Council by a private ‘sports and leisure management organisation’, as they call themselves, then, as a cost-cutting measure, they’ll have migrated the majority of their customer service and admin responsibilities to their app, without which you’ll find it extremely difficult to book any sessions.
This has essentially reduced Reception staff to de facto security guards, manning who can legally breach the turnstiles. That shouldn’t be a problem though, because as long as you’ve booked your session on the app, you’ll just be waived through, right? Wrong.
Attempting to enter fifteen minutes before your session starts? Access denied.
Attempting to enter just after your session has started? Access denied.
Attempting to enter to attend your session? Access denied.
Attempting to enter? Access denied.
Attempting? Access denied.
And if you are unable to attend a session you’ve booked, and don’t cancel in time, you’ll have a nominal charge placed on your account, which you’ll need to have removed before you can book any more sessions. So you attend Reception and request the charge be removed, because of course you can’t do it on the app, to which the receptionist/trainee life guard assures you ‘I’ve sent the request to management’, nodding in the direction of a room at the far end of the foyer, door ajar, in which some lanky child is hunched over a desktop computer scrolling through Daily Mail Online.
After this minor nonsense, you proceed to push through the double doors into the unisex changing room area, which smells of damp clothes, chlorine and burning plastic from the loose hairdryers provided in one corner, one of which is eternally on, its hot air over the decades having melted a portion of the wall. There are separate men’s and women’s changing rooms in here too, which I use. The men’s, I mean.
Although, on Tuesday evenings, you can book a session called ‘men’s only swimming – side pool’, to accommodate those who, for religious reasons or otherwise, do not mingle with the opposite sex in such settings. This is a thoughtful idea. Management temporarily swap the changing rooms around for this event, because the nominal women’s changing room has a passageway which leads directly to the side pool, so on Tuesdays men can use it to access the pool privately, without exposing themselves to the public (no, not like that). So in a way, on Tuesdays, I do use the women’s changing rooms.
The only problem however, and it’s just a small one, is that the door at the end of this passageway in the nominal women’s changing room, which leads directly to the side pool, is always, always locked, defeating the whole purpose of the temporary room-swapping and the session itself. Every week, I observe as Hasidic Jews march into the temporary men’s changing room, dressed in their traditional black attire, before emerging a few minutes later in their trunks, despondent, heads down, shuffling their way to the side pool using the public route, presumably having discovered that, yet again, the passageway door is locked.
I’ll return to the changing rooms later, literally and figuratively, but for now waddle with me over the slippery, muck-laden tiled floor, towel and locker key in one hand, water bottle in the other, until you reach the perimeter of the pool, hopefully in one piece.
There’s a sort of unwritten rule that the rows of plastic seats down one length of the perimeter of the pool are reserved for the (my former) local swimming club, but in the early days of my return I didn’t know this, so I’d place my towel and locker key on a seat, before having a quick chat with Tony, the club’s swimming instructor. Tony took over from my old instructor more than ten years ago, explaining that ‘he was let go after an incident, so they brought me in’. We both left it at that.
Being on this side of the pool allows me to take a peek at the full-length whiteboard, perched on the floor, on which Tony would write what his swimmers would be working on that session. I naively anticipated that once I’d got up to speed, I’d probably be able to follow their routine before long. However, after once reading ‘WARM UP – 1200m FRONT, 1200m BACK’ scrawled in red marker at the top of the board, I decided to start setting up camp on the other side of the pool instead.
This created a new problem; where to place my towel and locker key in this chair-less area, in such a way that the towel isn’t on the filthy floor and the locker key isn’t exposed, lest someone snatches it whilst I’m focusing on my breaststroke and steals all my clothes, leaving me having to trudge home in ill-fitting surplus staff clothing, kindly provided to me, out of pity, by Reception, in the same way kids in primary school would go home wearing lost property clothes after shitting themselves. I’ve since found a solution, involving perching my towel very intricately over a thin horizontal metal pole near the side of the pool, with locker key nestled snugly underneath, safely out of sight.
At this point you’re ready to enter the pool. You can use the metal stairs to enter gently if you’re elderly or a pansy, or you can tower over the lanes from the platform’s vantage point, casting your eyes far and wide in search of the least populated lane, before casually falling in feet first and bouncing off the pool floor, like the Olympic swimmers do before getting ready to do backstroke.
Obviously the water will either be too cold or too warm. If it’s too cold, this will prompt you to swim with fewer breaks, because during the breaks you’ll start shivering. But then without breaks you’ll get tired quicker so it’s a lose-lose situation. And if it’s too hot, you’ll dehydrate and be found at the bottom of the pool by the over-60s aerobics class instructor the following morning, your corpse all contorted from your cramped up muscles.
Once you’ve fiddled about with the straps on your goggles for long enough to give your body time to adjust to the temperature, you’re off. The direction of lane travel is either clockwise or anticlockwise, indicated by plastic boards placed at the end of each lane, which I can’t see because I’m short-sighted, so I just follow whatever everyone else is doing.
This relative blindness also means I can’t make out the time on the big analog clock at the far end, so in the early days I’d try to look at my wristwatch as discreetly as possible to assess how much more of this labouring is socially acceptable before I can get out of the pool with my dignity intact. However, now that I’m a weekly fixture here, I make a deliberate show of checking my watch, raising my arm up to my face, because it also looks like I’m timing myself, like the pros. I’m not (timing myself, nor a pro), but nobody needs to know that.
If you’re fortunate enough to have a lane all for yourself, or are sharing with just one other person, then you can swim in peace. But the likelihood is that you’ll be sharing a lane with balding middle-aged men and fat children. You want to tell them to move over to the next lane, which is more suited to their speed – the next lane consisting, of course, of other balding middle-aged men and fat children. But you don’t say a word because we’re British, so instead you passive-aggressively swim very close behind them, until you can almost reach out and grab their ankles, to demonstrate how they’re slowing us all down.
You must also somehow tolerate those whose technique is so bad, thrashing about in the water like a catfish on a hook, that as you pass them going the other way, their arms jut out and smack you on your back so hard you’d think it was intentional.
After almost forty minutes of battle, you wave the white flag and climb out of the pool, grab your stuff and head back in. My centre has recently refurbished the sauna and steam room area, so sometimes I spend a few minutes in the steam room, then shudder under a cold shower for a few seconds, then back into the steam room, because Joe Rogan said it’s good for your body or something.
Now, you’d imagine such an intimate setting, in which half-naked men and women are sat in the dark breathing deeply and very deliberately, would be deadly silent, and you’d be exactly right. However, I’m told of a nearby centre in which the steam room regulars have actual conversations in there, with words and noises, which is unfathomable to me.
You may get the odd occasion in there where two people recognise each other, but the sheer pressure to shut up, weighing down on their heads from everyone else, restricts their conversation to mere seconds. It could be two brothers serendipitously bumping into each other after ten years apart, and it would still go something like this:
‘Dennis, is that you?’
‘Jack, oh my God!’
‘Sshh, we’ll catch up after’
After prising your locker open, at the cost of your pound coin ricocheting off the wall and rolling into a gutter, you haul your gear into the changing room and dump it on the only bench which isn’t covered in splodges of body lotion, tufts of hair, or pools of pool water.
I avoid eye contact with people at the best of times, so imagine when accosted, for a conversation about the centre’s weekend opening times, by a fully naked, unseemly, greying man, like we’re just having a casual chat at a bus stop. I’m only wearing a towel; you’ve got your pecker out – where is your sense of shame? I almost admire the mistaken confidence to assume we have a connection because we’ve nodded at each other out of mutual recognition a few times, the sort of connection where you consider it totally normal to talk to me, a stranger, in person, without any clothes on, in public.
‘Have you seen they’ve added some swimming sessions on Saturdays now?’
‘Is it, that’s good’, I shout, eyes fixed on the floor, before switching on a hairdryer at full blast to send him the message.
As you hurriedly change and leave, ears blocked and hair still damp, you’re resigned to never coming back here again in order to avoid Creepy McCreepface, but Friday rolls around and you find yourself in the pool once again, swimming laps round the slow lads, feeling like Phelps.
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A Series Of Pointless Conversations 