Over 300,000 adults swim in pools in Ireland every week. Incredible. We need more pools and better pools, yes. While we’re at it, we need every person in this country who dips their toe in shared chlorinated water to get a lesson in etiquette. Pools often have signs saying: no running, no diving, no bombing. I think we could do with some bigger signs.
It’s the leg danglers that get me. When doing lengths and trying to turn at the wall, two idling pins block your chance to twist and push off again. It is the swimming equivalent of standing at the bottom of a moving escalator. I try to think through their logic, to be fair to them, that maybe it is a temperature adaptation thing.
The other day, as I finished a length in a clockwise running lane, there was a person on the left side of the lane taking a break. I pulled to the right to find two milky calves swinging, so I had to lurch upwards a foot from the wall, turning and restarting awkwardly in the water. When I got back to the same spot, three minutes later, two people were resting on the left, and the third person’s legs were still trailing down the wall. It was quite a gathering.
Blocking the wall because you’re catching your breath between laps, grand. Relaxing on the pool lip with the water lapping gently at your shins, disruptive. I came home spluttering about the impropriety of the limbs. My husband implied, bravely, that maybe I could be more relaxed about the whole thing.
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To try to explore whether it was just me being uptight or if there were some sort of generally agreed-upon dos and don’ts that would make me feel like I was being reasonable, I did some online research. I was aghast that the first website that I clicked into, for a pool in the US, suggested that you can put your legs in the water to let the person doing laps know that you’re there.
It sounded ludicrous to me until I remembered a swim in a pool in the midlands last year. Unlike the pool I normally use, the lanes weren’t marked fast, medium, slow, so I picked a lane with just one swimmer going at my pace. He pushed off the wall. I slipped in, gave him some distance, and set off behind him.
It was a lovely, bright pool, and I was delighted to have found it until I felt an almighty crack on my head and stood up, gasping. Before I could get my goggles up, the man who had crashed into me after swimming back down the same side of the lane he had gone up, started roaring at me that when there are only two people in the pool, you each take one side of the lane.
I was not used to this custom, but, as it turns out, the stupid American pool website I had found also gave splitting the lane as an option, rather than following the ‘circle’ method. I was wondering, though, what would happen when a third person wants to get in? Apparently, that person should wait (they didn’t specify leg dangling) and then say something along the lines of, “Ahoy there, matey, can I join you?”
I looked closer to home. Astonishingly, one Irish website said that what we need to do is be direct but polite if someone is wrecking our buzz in the pool. For example, you should apparently be able to say to someone who is floating on their back down the middle of the fast lane that they “might feel more comfortable in the slow lane”. We have three options in Ireland, and polite directness is not one of them. Suffer in silence, be passive aggressive or throw an absolute wobbler. I asked a few people what they would do about the legs. Swim straight into them, of course. They’d soon learn.
I would try to psych myself up to be courteously assertive, but I can hardly get in or out of the pool for the amount of gear on the grate. It increases by the week. Flippers. Fins. Snorkels. Hand paddles. Notebooks. Laminated training plans. Flip flops. Goggle cases. Floaties. Kickboards. Earplugs. Earphones. Nose clips. Bottles the size of kettles. When I saw a chilled bottle of sparkling San Pellegrino at the end of the lane, I fought the urge to whip it like a boomerang straight through the window into the car park.
So chaotic is the repository beside the pool that I assumed a large black plastic box with a tube coming out of it was some new must-have contraption for swimmers. As it turned out, it was the pool vacuum cleaner, but no doubt that’s the kind of thing that is coming next. Like some of the older people at the sea swimming spots around the country who used newspapers to dry off after a dip, I long for a simpler time.
My main way of coping with other people’s behaviours, habits and equipment, naturally, is to give out about it to other people.
“Yer man’s back at it, in the thong, doing slow, wide-kick breaststroke,” I tell my friend. She finds the changing rooms to be where it’s most difficult to navigate other people’s practices. “A woman fully dried her bush with a hairdryer and brush right beside me,” she said. As I was wiping tears of laughter from my cheeks, she added, “It was a round, metal brush.” I’ll stick to the pool.
