Flashes of Panic

There is a park out our front windows, and at the other end of the park is a pool. We arrived too late to get much use from it, but since I won’t be in the University pool for a few more weeks, I trotted down yesterday to get a $15 pool pass for the days remaining until it closes at the end of this month. The staff was brusque and prickly as you might expect yesterday when I was signing up, and in fact, they were a bit difficult today when I showed up today, as they were kicking the kids out for “adult swim” time, to collect and use my new pass.

Practically nobody turns up for the adult swim hours. When they kicked the kids out at 4, I got in, and I was the only one in the pool until they closed at 5. (I didn’t swim the whole hour; nobody got in after me.) I believe the pool is 25 meters (not yards), aka “short course meters,” and it has a current: it takes me eleven strokes swimming towards the building, and nine swimming away. A 25y pool with no current is either eight or nine strokes, depending on how tired I am. I asked a lifeguard if it was 25 yards; he was uncertain and suggested 27 yards, which would confirm my 25m theory, since 25m is 27 yards and three inches.

The lifeguards were a crew of high school and early college age kids, and typically uninterested in someone who only went up and back in the pool, but the adult staff was fascinated with me. When I was leaving, the woman who had given me my pass asked if I was a “serious swimmer.” I’d only done 1500m, and a good in-season winter workout should be twice that; I was doing 2,000y to 2,400y in Amherst. I wasn’t particularly self-impressed, but I guess it made me about as serious an athlete as they ever see there. I told them I would be running more than an hour a day if I could, so half an hour of swimming didn’t count for much in my view.

They were still pretty impressed, and it clearly had changed their attitude towards me. Instead of being yet another person ignoring the rules (the multitude of posted and printed rules in that place is staggering) and making their jobs difficult, I became someone who was positively interested in improving myself with the service they provided, and they started telling me which hours were the best times to come and have the pool to myself, which is actually very useful information. I also suspect they’re overlooking some of the more inconvenient rules for me, like the one which would appear to keep me from leaving my pull buoy, kickboard, paddles, etc. on the wall while I’m not using them.

Now Playing: The Shore and Stars by Austin Hartley-Leonard