Never fear, Princess Perfect Hair, I'll protect you!

Good afternoon all!

Aren't I so cute in my new swim wear?

Recently I remembered that I have a gym membership to Xperience Fitness and I also remembered that I invested some serious bucks into new full coverage swim bottoms and caps and that I should probably make use of both.  Thusly I started making an afternoon pool workout part of my day.  Been there twice this week, hope to get there again today. We'll see if this can keep going.

Anyway, to understand my encounter yesterday you must first understand the pool and its unwritten rules.  It's a typical health club pool, not too big and not too deep. Three lanes are marked off with ropes.  Open swim every weekday afternoon from 1-4, although it strikes me as a generally underused pool since there aren't a ton of classes going on. 

I digress.

The afternoon open swim, and I've been there several times now over the last year, is not so much a swim as it is a gathering of old fluffy people who have been instructed to get more exercise, but who do not like to jar their joints in any way at all.  (More attractive people would say something like, "One wishes they'd be more protective of other people's eyes rather than their own joints" but I'm not that person because I'm right there with the rest of the aging fluffies.) It's a genteel group, and often numbers more than three, so lane sharing is expected, and not a big deal since most of us just walk or stretch or trot or whatever.  We certainly don't, you know, swim.

Occasionally an actual person who actually wants to swim actual laps shows up.  It's rare.  But we, the water walkers, let them swim laps and we just crowd the other lanes with more walkers.

Personally I don't care for this much contact while I'm swimming/walking/being in public in my swim wear.  But it is what it is.  So I share lanes if I must and I live my life.

Yesterday I got to the pool around 1:20, same time as usual, and there was no one in the pool. No one!  It was lovely. Smooth water, no echoing voices, no lane sharing, just me, a pool, and my thoughts.

That ended about fifteen minutes later when three people showed

You may be in the pool, but only if you do not
get water near my hair.

up.  The first two were ladies, one I'd never seen before and one I'd seen many times. This woman I'll all Princess Perfect Hair.  PPH is one of those older women who thinks the pool is hers and she makes the rules. She's there all the time. When she came back from her month long vacation in Florida she was super tan (read here, "leathery") and all a flutter about how she and her friends went to this place and that.  (She talks to everyone very loudly.  People who converse while working out bother me.)  She wears jewelry in the pool, lots of gold chains and whatnot and she never, NEVER gets her hair wet.  She doesn't wear a cap like I do (sometimes) because that would make her hair less than perfect.

Now I never really gave her much mind since she's usually there before I get there and she seems nice to everyone and everyone seems to love her.  She always takes the lane with the stairs, because then she can just stride into the pool like Cleopatra or something.  She shares lanes if she must, but she's fairly picky. You must only walk in her lane.  You mustn't swim or use floaties or jog. (She and I shared a lane once.)

So I was in the far right lane, where there was a ladder but no stairs. New lady was in the middle, and PPH was in the far left, gliding majestically down the steps into the water.

As for the third person who showed up, well, it was a guy.  And I could tell immediately that this was going to be a problem because the guy had goggles, which meant he wanted to swim laps.  He made the hand gestures to the woman in the middle lane and she nodded, indicating they would share.

But PPH had something to say about that.

"Oh are you swimming?"

"Yes," says he.

"Can you by any chance swim in the far lane?  I don't want to be splashed."

He sort of looks at me and I shrug and say, "No biggie, I'll go in the middle lane and give you more room."

Which I do and he does and that puts him as far away as possible from PPH.

Oh, and then another lane swimmer showed up, but he must have understood the rules because he just went in the far lane and left PPH a full, unshared, unsplashed space to herself.

I mean...she's in the pool.  And she's worried about the splash from someone swimming...in the pool.

Well never fear there PPH....I absorbed the bulk of the splash (there was none) and you, in turn, made the blog.  So we both win.