Had a weird thing happen at practice today. I was finishing my swim with a set of 25yd butterfly to work on my stroke. I had the lane to myself, and for a time, both lanes to either side were empty. About midway through my set, an older woman got into the lane next to me and started swimming. Ordinarily I'd pay it no mind, but at one point when I was resting she turned to me and said "you know, it's really hard for me to swim backstroke when you're swimming like that, you're a real jerk!"
When she began her statement, I thought she was going to make some kind of joking comment. But as she finished it, I realized she was serious, and it kinda caught me off guard. Since the lane on the other side was open, I moved over a lane so as not to disturb her, and tried to apologize when she was at the end of the lane, but she just curtly replied "fine" and went on about her swim.
So my question is this, does swimming butterfly make me a jerk? I'm not going to stop swimming fly, but I'm just curious if anyone else has run afoul of other swimmers getting bent out of shape in this manner. To summarize, we both were in separate lanes (6ft wide), and she was swimming, not water walking. I wonder if Phelps runs into these problems :D
Former Member
There's a small percentage of miserable old farts in this world. They start out as young farts and just keep getting stinkier with age.
You just happened to have a close encounter with one in your pool. Being kind to them just makes them more miserable as they often thrive on conflict.
Keep doing your butterfly, and she's thick enough to swim next to your lane again...tell her that your goal is to be the biggest jerk ever. Just like Michael Phelps. :)
Why is it that this behavior is so much easier to recognize when they're behind the wheel of a car?
So my question is this, does swimming butterfly make me a jerk? Yip, absolutely. I am a jerk too you know?
The other day I was swimming BF. My right arm got into a collision with someone else's arm (like it happens some time). So quick stop I say I am sorry then I resume (I had an interval to respect).
The other swimmer goes after the lifeguard to file a complaint.
The only detail is that this darn other swimmer was not even in my lane. In other words, I was being so cautious not to harm people in my own lane by making sure I was not taking the middle of it, that I harmed swimmer of another lane.
Lifeguard came at me and said: Let's pretend that I am giving you a warning, other folk is pissed but I know you did nothing wrong. So let's just pretend...
Swimming BF in a public session makes us a bunch of jerks, absolutely.
My husband even got some of this one time when he went swimming. It made him much more sympathetic for what I put up with sometimes LOL. Now my husband, by our definition, is more of a paddler. One evening when he was swimming, he accidentally brushed against an, ummm, plus size woman. She tried to cry sexual harassment against him :shakeshead:
Being polite is great but that doesn't mean you have to let jerks walk all over you. Earlier this year I was waiting in the port-a-potty line at a triathlon. There were two women in front of me and we had all been waiting for about 10 minutes. Some guy casually walks over to the john, keeping his back to us, and starts to go straight to the door as the person inside is coming out. He's trying to pretend that we all don't exist.
I look at the women in front of me, then survey the rest of the line behind me. I see irritation and resignation in their eyes and realize that they aren't going to bother making a scene. So I walk right up to the guy, cutting him off and say loudly "Hey you need to go to the back of the line". He looks right at me with a badly manufactured look of confusion and says in a deadpan voice, "oh, there's a a line?" "Yeah, that line right there", I say, pointing to the line 6 feet from where he's standing. All of this in a very loud voice so everyone around can hear.
He goes to the back of the line and we all proceed in an orderly fashion. When I come out of the john I give him a big smile as I walk by. I hope he enjoyed standing there embarrassed while everyone around him knew he had tried to cut in line at the potty.
If I hadn't been aggressive enough to correct him, the other 20 or 30 people would have just let the jerk take advantage of them. I've had the same thing happen to me at the airport. I am happy to take on the responsibility of being the rude one in those cases.
Maybe the situation with the lady in the pool was a one-time thing and it was best to accommodate her. Or maybe it just encouraged her to treat the pool like her own private domain and bully others in the future. I wouldn't have moved. I probably would have just laughed and kept swimming, then if she pressed the issue I might have asked for an explanation, weighed it, and probably still ignored her and kept on swimming. Depending on where I was in my workout I may have wasted a few breaths explaining to her that it was a pool, people swim there, etc. etc. Probably not though. There are lifeguards around who can do that.
