In The Pool with Cranky

So in my effort to one day rock the triathlon world (like Speedy Speed Racer did very recently), I have been learning to swim. This began in January with lessons which quickly established I had issues with the water. I like to think that the issues are fewer now since I have no problem hitting the pool three times a week, all the while looking like I know what the hell I’m doing while I’m there. I’m no way near ready for completing any measured distance, but I can sure do my time at a good pool facility (good enough for you-know-who to train there when he visits NYC) on the upper east side of Manhattan. And I’m not as good a swimmer as I’d like to be, but like the grownups say, it’s important to have goals.

I have a day membership (only) at the pool, which for me means no early morning or evening swimming with the Olympians and other wannabes. Instead, the folks I encounter are either senior citizens or kids, so I’m often the sole representative of the demographic in between. This makes for some odd looks from the other swimmers and an occasional lifeguard, usually bored out of his mind and silently contemplating murder/suicide by paddle board.

To get to the reality of all this, it’s like a senior citizen party, à la Cocoon, every single day. The old men amble down the pool lanes, and a handful of elderly women crawl on top of the water with full scuba-diving outfits. On most occasions, I’m passing these folks, and I’m no speed demon, either. And I really don’t think I’m ready for the cover of GQ anytime soon, but when I’m in the locker room the wrinkles and back hair and rolls of skin that everybody else seems to have makes me look like Crank E. Adonis just in from Marathon. Believe me, I don’t try to look, but, either way, it just ain’t pretty in there. I’m just glad the kids have their own locker room, we don’t have enough money in the health care system to cover that kind of therapy.

Anyway, on this particular day I get in the pool and am surrounded by members of the AARP since 1942. And then there’s the kids; if you’re under ten years old, you must, must, scream at the top of your lungs like Mariah Carey finishing an encore, or calling her dog, or both. Kids are LOUD. And they get in the water and do the splashy-splashy and scream like they’re recreating scenes from The Old Testament. Pharoah probably had a public pool outside his bedroom window, and one day, just snapped. Like the whole Moses thing was an afterthought.

The kids over age 10 are more serious about swimming, so they get in the marked lanes. My pool facility has a ‘Summer Day Camp’ program with what seems like 7000 schools in New York City, so every day for the last month or so orange school buses line up in front of the facility and push out scores of kids ready to work off all that bodyfat the news media keeps going on about. And so crowds of chubby pre-teens ring the pool waiting for their time to get in while I and several 70- and 80-year-olds slap at the water. By 10AM you’re out, because Charles Manson Middle School is ready to get in and work off last night’s KFC. I’d like to write a letter to somebody to complain, but I know I’d get some ‘kids are our future’ and a ‘precious resource’-type answer, and I’d be fighting a long, losing battle in child-centric New York.

So one day I show up at the pool right after 9AM, giving myself about an hour to swim before eviction. I notice two gray-haired guys in the widest lane on the left, and it looks like they’re wearing scuba gear. I get in the lane next to them, between them and the younger kids’ pool, a veritable toddler soup of high-pitched ultrasonic screams probably driving some german shepherd in the neighborhood completely insane.

As I make my way down the lane, with reasonably good form I’ll have you know, I see that one of the divers is CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He’s learning to use a tank, and dive, and all that, while wearing black, rubber flippers that would even look too big on Bozo the Clown. I overlook my flipper envy and return back down the lane like the rat in water I am. This routine goes on for a while, and every time my head is down in the water (most of the time) I can hear the hissing of oxygen tanks alternating with what sounds like the slaughter of the innocents. So the soundtrack of my day goes something like this:

(dive, swim, blow out)
Blurgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh….
Hissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss…
(come up for air, right ear hears children screaming)
Shrieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek….
(head back down, four strokes)
Blurgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh….
Hissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss…
(come back up for air, hear more screaming, etc…..)

And on and on it goes. And I look down at the bottom of the pool, and AC of CNN looks up and sees Monsieur Le Crank with his locker room beauty pageant Burger King paper crown passing overhead.

And now it’s nearing 10AM, and it’s attack of the pre-teens. They arrive like the Mongol hordes, and sit at the ends of the pool with their stubby legs in the water, six to a lane. And they watch. The elderly swimmers start to get skeeved, they’ve seen Village of the Damned already, and they’re out of there. And it’s just me on the surface, and Anderson and his trainer lounging on the pool floor. And I’m NO good at being watched by strangers, especially feral ones, so I have to pull out all the stops on correct swimming form for the kids. ‘Do it for The Children!’… And they watch, though I get the feeling they’d much rather see a Rihanna or Jonas Brothers video on YouTube than my speedo-busting butt bobbing down the lane, back and forth. At this point, you probably can figure out that there’s not going to be much of a punch line to this story, all I can say is that it was a rather new experience. Me in a chlorine thunderdome, complete with news media representative in case things got really scary. But it already had gotten scary, in the men’s locker room.

Mr. Cooper (or Vanderbilt, I should say, I imagine he doesn’t need the money) made his way nonchalantly out of the water. After finishing my last loop in seemingly perfect form, I exited the pool as distractedly as the kids went in. Back I went to the locker room for the awards ceremony, where I would win in my age group. Because I was the only person IN my frickin’ age group.

And so this is how I practice swimming. Not with wetsuits and colored swim caps and lake bacteria, but with chlorine and Old Spice consumers and celebrities and hovering city kids. How funky/New York City of me. At this rate I’ll be ready for my first tri by spring, 2010.