Lesson Learned

Last night I discovered that going to the Y when there are only 2 lanes open for lap swimming is a bad idea. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks early evening is a good time to go swimming. They have morning lap swim with all 6 lanes available and I'm sure that's when the hard core swimmers go. And hat's when I'll be going from now on.

I'm going to be b***hy swimmer girl for a moment and complain, so just move along if you'd rather not read a tirade.

First of all, midway through my workout, this dad and his kids decided to cross the lap swim lanes to get across the pool. So fine. You wait until the swimmers have passed and then you go. But no. Two of the boys went just as I was getting to the end, and then the third little boy vaulted off the lane line into the middle of the lane, right in front of me. If he had jumped a couple of seconds later, he would have landed on top of me. I know kids are rambunctious, but Dad was standing RIGHT NEXT TO HIM, just watching him go over the lane line. I popped up and the dad said, "Oh, sorry about that." I was the only one in the lane at that point. Would it have been awful to, you know, hang onto your kid for a few seconds and wait for me to go by?

Then about 10 minutes later, I was in the middle of a 200 when I realized that there were a man and a woman standing at the end of the lane, blocking me from doing a flipturn. Okaaay....

I popped my head up and the woman said, "We can swim a circuit." For those of you who don't know, circuit swimming is basically what you do during swim team practice when there are a bunch of people in one lane. You space the swimmers and swim up the right side of the lane and back down the left. Now that works just fine when you're all about the same skill level and going about the same speed, but it is a disaster when levels are mismatched. As shown last night.

The woman said, "You go first because you're stronger." At this point I was still standing in the middle of the lane about 10 feet from the end because they were still blocking the entire end. I asked, "Well, can I have some space to push off?" I think that was when they realized they were blocking the entire lane because they looked surprised and moved out of the way.

So I started swimming. The woman came after me, swimming a leisurely freestyle. Then came the man, swimming a veeeery slow breaststroke. So basically I did a 50 and caught up to the man, but as I was going to pass him, the woman came swimming by on the other side, blocking me. My only choice was to stop in the middle of the lap and wait.

At that point I realized that continuing to swim was pointless, and I got out. Only 64 laps.

Usually when I swim, everyone just waits if there are already two people in a lane because they recognize that circuit swimming doesn't really work, but I guess they both wanted to swim really badly RIGHT then. Annoying.

Let's hope swimming in the mornings is less chaotic.