Brats and Bouncers

Lately at my local YMCA swimming pool, as the temperatures have climbed, so has the pool population density. Good for the YMCA, bad for me...

I keep thinking back to that South Park episode that features spoiled brat Eric Cartman trying to avoid the throng of little kids while going to the public swimming pool. His gripe was that they tended to pee in the water; my gripe with them is that they just get in my way. So they really aren't any different from the elderly ladies who go there for water aerobics, an activity that basically involves bouncing up and down in the water (thus I call them "bouncers").

I am trying to build up my swimming endurance to the point where I can just use the 25-meter lanes and completely avoid the shallow section. I may not be quite ready for the lanes yet, but I might just have to go ahead and take the "plunge". For I have had it with the brats and the bouncers.

Sunday afternoon: little kids all over the place. For someone who just wants to swim in a straight line and come back in the shallow end, trying to avoid them can become an exercise in futility. Monday was a different story: I went to the pool at 11 AM on a school day, thinking that I would avoid any hassles with the kids being at school. Wrong. Renegade bouncers (without a structured water aerobics class) were spread out throughout the shallow part, taking up way too much of the pool. I managed to find one little section that I thought I could swim back and forth in, but these ladies seemed to take a perverse sort of pleasure in drifting directly into my path. Finally, after only 20 laps I gave up and left the pool.

Maybe all is for the better anyway, if I want to become an endurance swimmer. I know I can physically handle the longer laps; my hangup is more psychological and simply won't be overcome without pushing through and gaining positive-reinforcing experiences. So either tomorrow or Friday I'll start those longer laps, which run through the pool's deep section. Hey, they've always got a lifeguard, hopefully prepared to pull my drowning ass out of the water!