Swimming Pool Etiquette: A Few Short Anecdotes from the Swimming Pool (Part 1)

I've recently taken up swimming as a new way to get some exercise, since, for various reasons, I haven't been able to join a gym, and when I tried to do aerobics I failed monumentally. Whilst I was swimming the other day I began thinking that all these things kept happening that I thought were fairly amusing and decided I should create a hub to share them with you. I subsequently realised I had too much to say to fit in just one hub so I now intend to make a whole series of these little anecdotes, which I hope you enjoy.

I assume that there are some things that are just obvious to anyone who’s been in or near a swimming pool. For instance, not swimming into someone else and leaving enough room as you swim past someone so that you don’t kick them in the face. There are other unwritten rules that seem to be obvious to most people, for example, where you can and can’t jump into a pool and how it is bad to furiously splash at a complete stranger as you swim near them.

The place that I’ve started going to separates the swimming pool into three sections: The section for people messing around and not seriously swimming, the few lanes for the people who are seriously swimming, and finally the lanes for kids having swimming lessons. Quite unfairly, I feel, the lanes for the people who just want a proper swim seem to be the smallest part. It doesn’t need to be massively big because all you do is swim up one side and then back down the other. But last time I went they gave us serious swimmers a lane and a half in which to do this. Now this means there is barely enough room for two people to pass each other comfortably and I always worried that I’m going to be on the giving or receiving end of a slap in the arm/face/inappropriate body part. But then some spatially unaware speedy gonzalez feels that this is the exact moment that she absolutely has to overtake me.

This results in several things happening: the first time, it meant that I had to practically stop swimming (to giving the other two people room to pass each other) which of course was at the deepest part of the pool. Seeing as I am fairly short and the pool was fairly deep I could not touch the bottom and I had to tread water (badly) until everyone had got passed and then inhaled a large amount of water trying to get the momentum to get going again (which ended in me accidentally kicking a wall). The second time this happened there was no wall to stop and press myself against, and as I slowed down I was faced with the prospect of moving out the way only to be faced with a mass of oncoming children *gulp*. I had a laugh though watching some guy overtaking a woman who was going really slowly at the same time as this old man was coming the other way. The old guy got a kick in the shoulder (I think) and was visibly flustered and the overtaking guy got a slap on the wrists from the lifeguard and said in his defence that he ‘got distracted and must have drifted over.’ Some excuse!

The final thing that occurred to me on the subject of swimming pool etiquette, as I spat a gallon of water out of my mouth and contemplated going home: ‘I wonder how many of these kids still wee in the pool!’