Life in the fast lane

I went swimming at lunchtime, thanks to my fierce friend & colleague L, who goes three times a week and makes me feel shit if I don't go with her at least once. She is in her costume and in the pool before I have put my bag in the locker, and striding out of the changing room fully dressed by the time I get back from the shower, so we only go together in the loosest possible sense, but it does get me there and for this I am very grateful.

And something very liberating happened today. There are two lanes at lunchtime, plus a wider bit which you can use as a lane but usually has Very Slow Old People in it, plus women who don't like getting their hair wet. And the lanes are marked Slow and Fast.

In essence, I have observed, this is like marking them Women and Men. Women tend to think "well, I might be Medium, but I'm definitely not Fast", and go in the slow lane. Men tend to think "well, I might be Medium but I'm definitely not Slow" and go in the fast lane.

Which would be ok I guess, except there are usually far more women than men swimming at lunchtime, so you get seven of us bumping into each other's feet and some lucky guy gets a whole lane to himself. But the leap from Slow to Fast seems just too big for the average woman to make. I have certainly never dared.

Until today. Today the slow lane was crowded, the big wide lane had people doing random things in it, and I was feeling brave. So I got straight in the fast lane and did front crawl as fast as I could for four lengths and nearly killed myself. Then... the lone man in the fast lane got out and I had the whole lane to myself!

So I went back to my usual mixture of strokes, getting off on the space but swimming as fast as possible in case anyone shouted 'Hey, you're only Medium' at me. And, of course, ready to slip under the barrier into Slow if a genuinely Fast person came along.

About four lengths later, something odd happened. A woman came out of the changing rooms, looked in the pool at me, then got in the fast lane. And then another, and another. And by ten lengths in there were as many of us in the fast lane as in the slow lane, all shapes and sizes and colours of the rainbow, different strokes for different folks etc. One of the pool staff picking up floats stopped to watch, a whole lane full of women who had thought 'yes, I feel fast enough today'.

It was great.

At one point I did get stuck behind a leg-flailing woman in one of those tankini things. I felt like saying 'hey, don't you know this is the fast lane?'. But I didn't.

joella