It has been an incredible year for Irish swimming – three Olympic medals, fantastic performances at the World Championships and short course Worlds, and national record after national record put to bed. If, like many, you’ve been inspired all the way to the local pool, we warmly await your cap-clad arrival to the poolside of your choosing. But please, tread carefully.
As a twice- or thrice-weekly lunchtime lane-swimmer, I have advice to help you glide seamlessly into this world without enraging your new colleagues. Swimming is unusual among sports for how close it forces you to be with your fellow athletes and it can involve some calibration to maintain a decent rhythm. But lane selection is perilously self-assessed. I see crimes at both ends of the spectrum – fast people menacing the fine citizenry of the slow lane, and splashy slow swimmers disrupting the fast lane.
Often, I can see the latter coming. They’re men in good shape, and they choose lanes on identity grounds (“I’m just a fast lane kinda guy”) rather than swimming ability.
The following happens frequently. I’m in the fast lane, swimming medium/fast laps of the pool (50m in under a minute, at least), stopping every 12 laps. Someone enters the lane, and just as I am, say, 4m from their end, about to turn and go again, the person takes off. Now, I can’t just tumble-turn and continue, as I’ll swim directly into the back of them as I come out of the turn. So, I stop. Or rather, I am stopped. They can’t see my reaction, which is visibly frustrated, so there’s nothing to stop this becoming a continuing theme in our shared lane experience.
Occasionally, I’ve attempted a discussion, but swimming pools are terrible mediation spaces. “I’m sorry but, I notice you keep just beginning as I’m about to turn. Could you please, em, just wait until I’ve turned or go when I’m at the other end?” They look genuinely confused or roll their eyes, and a weird mood captures the lane – one heightened by all the inscrutable goggle-wearing. If, instead of talking, I respond by just turning anyway and immediately overtaking, they often speed up, and an exhausting, close-quarters race ensues.
The next point: if someone taps your foot, don’t panic. When returning to lane-swimming, I learned the main rule was that if a swimmer behind taps your foot, that’s a signal they want to overtake, and you should respond by making that easy – don’t stop dead, but swim on slowly to allow them to get around you quickly. The one time I’ve attempted this recently, it was met with complete bafflement (they stopped and turned around, thinking I was trying to chat). Unfortunately, the intersection between the set of people who swim enough to know the rule, and the people likely to need to be overtaken, is vanishingly small. Thus, a foot tap in the wild is likely to be interpreted as anything from an unwelcome rogue tickle to an act of physical hostility.
I’m no Daniel Wiffen. I find it intimidating when someone faster joins my lane. If there’s a free one, or another one that’s moving well, I’ll often switch. When I can’t switch without sacrificing a good training session, I’m very mindful of not messing up their rhythm. I’ll swim four lengths for every six they do and slide to the corner, or up on to the edge, giving them lots of room to turn and overtake.
This sounds neurotic, but I have come to think the neuroticism is linked to ways women have of perceiving their bodies and the space they take up. It’s why I get so frustrated when a person cuts me off. I avoid attributing malice where obliviousness is plausible. So, when I think about what it must be like not to be worried about blocking someone else’s way, to be so completely unconscious of the space my body takes up as to not see that I’m going to force someone else to stop, I’m both jealous and annoyed. For me, taking off just before a faster swimmer turns would be no less craven than chasing and then lying down in front of a jogger.
Some philosophy I read recently illuminated my rage. Phenomenologists believed the history of western philosophy had relegated the body to a kind of shell that the mind, as the proper seat of consciousness, merely drags around with it. Descartes & Co prioritised the mental over the physical. For phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, we are our bodies.
In Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Marion Young uses phenomenology to explain how women can struggle to achieve a harmonious relationship with physical activity. According to Young, at our most primal, people are bodies, interacting freely with our environments. The body is capacity — a set of powers. But this can work differently for women. Young describes a corrupted version where the power is inhibited, its relationship with its surroundings flounders, causing feelings of incapacity, frustration and self-consciousness.
In layman’s terms, we regard our bodies in a way that interferes with the experience of them as primarily powerful. We think about our bodies as objects rather than subjects – things that other people see or, in the case of swimming pools, things that may be in someone else’s way.
This is why, in addition to manspreading, we have womansquinching. Consider the shared armrests between public seats, like those on planes and trains. For those of us whose phenomenology has been beaten down by life, those armrests will always be about occupying space. The idea of freely engaging them simply to reduce the weight-bearing load of our arms, without a thought for the rival elbow is mere fantasy. Similarly, I overthink my lane etiquette, constantly worrying over the possibility of my body becoming an encumbrance to another. It’s a shame, because it is while swimming uninterrupted that I feel the most primal relationship with my body. I feel like the driver of a decent car, and less like a road hazard.
So, if swimming is your new year’s resolution, and you are in the fortunate camp for whom your connection to your body is so natural that you don’t anticipate when you come close to causing a two-body-pile-up, I implore you, try to pick the right lane.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin
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