Lane Etiquette

ok so if you've ever swum laps at a public pool you already know the medium lane is a lawless place. It's where people who are too fast for slow and too honest for fast end up, and they all resent each other for it. I started at the Coburg pool in March because a doctor used the phrase "borderline" about three separate numbers and I wanted an activity I couldn't quit by pretending it was raining. Indoor pool. No excuses. 6:15am, three days a week, that was the deal I made with myself. First Tuesday I got in the medium lane and this tiny woman in a floral cap tapped my foot at the wall after about four laps. Tapped it! I'd been warned about this. It's the swimming equivalent of a car flashing its lights at you. I let her past. She was probably eighty. Thin arms, brown as a saddle, absolutely no wasted motion. She went by me like I was furniture. Then again. Then again. By week three I'd learned her name from the lifeguard. Hilde. Came every day. "Don't try to keep up with Hilde," he said, "the swim squad kids can't keep up with Hilde." I tried to keep up with Hilde. It went about how you'd expect. I'd get to the wall gasping and she'd be already tumbling off it, no gasping, no pause, just this metronome breathing every third stroke. I'd count her laps when I was resting (pretending to fix my goggles) and she did forty. Every morning. Two kilometres. At eighty. Around June I stopped trying to beat her and started trying to copy her. Where her hands went in. How high her elbows came. How she didn't kick much at all, really, just this lazy flutter, everything coming from the shoulders and the hips. My laps got longer before I had to stop. Then I stopped stopping. One morning in July she was resting at the wall, which I had never seen, and I pulled up next to her. "You've got better," she said. German accent, or Dutch maybe. "You used to fight the water."

"I was trying to keep up with you." "Nobody keeps up with me. I've been doing this since 1961." She adjusted her cap. "Rule for the medium lane: swim your own swim. Let the fast ones past. Don't apologise to the slow ones." Then she pushed off and went and did another twenty. My numbers aren't borderline anymore, the doc was actually quite pleased, but honestly that's not why I still go. It's that at 6:15 on a Tuesday there's a floral cap two lanes over doing forty laps, and I'm doing thirty now, and if I'm honest I've started tapping feet myself. Gently. With love.