After one month of dedicated effort, I am no longer a member of my local fitness facility.
My pickleball fanatic friend took me as a guest to a new place in town a few weeks ago to enjoy the walking track. We chatted and walked, forgetting the number of laps we made around the balcony and watched the pickleballers rotate in and out of their games on the court below. I enjoyed our walking workout. In fact, thought I might like to come back. I could walk regularly, regardless of the weather.
When we passed through the locker room and peeked into the pool area, I finally heard the siren song. Only three swimmers were in the lap pool. I admired its sparkling blue water and clean, stainless steel edges. Off to my right in the giant space, a warmer, all-shallow pool with a ramp welcomed exercising seniors, just my crowd.
Yep, this was where I wanted to be! It brought back happy memories of my college days when I swam a few times each week between teaching and lifeguarding.
So I dragged my husband back to the facility for a tour and convinced him that we should add about $80 to our monthly budget so that I could swim. As a bonus, he could use the other facilities whenever he wanted. I planned to get up early to go swimming three mornings a week. Best of all, our granddaughter could join us, too, when she was in town. We paid the initial fee, chose a locker to rent, and bought a lock with a programmable code. I was all set!
Or so I thought.
My overthinking got in the way.
During high school, I spent my summers at a camp in northern Indiana teaching kids to swim and boat. Eventually, I spent five years at that camp, soaking up the sun while moving kids through Beginner, Advanced Beginner, Intermediate, and Swimmer levels of the American Red Cross Swimming program. At the beginning of the season, I’d visit the county’s Red Cross chapter to collect their materials. Then every week, I’d list the swimming graduates’ names on the official forms, write out their certification cards, poke the appropriate level pins through the corner of the cards, and proudly bestow them on that week’s crop of aquatics graduates. The Swimmer-level campers and counselors who swam all the way across the lake and back for their distance test– through the perilous weed patch– received special recognition. It was quite an accomplishment!
I taught a lot of kids how to swim from that pier on Big Cedar over the years.
With that background, during college, it was a natural for me to teach swimming lessons and lifeguard after my morning English Education classes were finished. On Monday through Thursday afternoons and on most weekends, too, I tossed babies into their parents’ arms, sweet-talked nervous adults into putting their faces into the water, and taught teenagers how to be lifeguards. I put a choir robe over my swimsuit and stood discreetly nearby to ensure that newly baptised Christians didn’t drown, and I portaged a canoe through downtown streets from the Red Cross to the pool on boating safety days.
I taught a lot of people how to swim back then.
And I saw a lot of stuff.
Stuff that has burned its way into my head.
Globs of snot running down kids’ faces and disappearing as they bobbed under the water before I could grab their nearby towel.
Babies with leaky plastic pants.
A beginner who swallowed too much water and promptly vomited it and his supper all over the bare chest of a fellow instructor.
And those just involved people. The facilities created their own searing images.
The occasional wad of hair suspended in the pool during the last free swim of the evening made me stifle a gag and scurry for the net. I couldn’t decide which was worse: seeing the clump floating like a jellyfish or having to thwack it off the skimmer onto the deck for the custodians to remove later.
The pool deck itself also revolted me at times, even though we were very fussy about who was allowed to walk on the deck back in those days. “No Street Shoes!” the signs screamed! But the dirty white remnants of a string mop left here and there always induced a half-gag. Ever seen the water in those mop buckets? I quickly learned that flip-flops were a necessity.
The locker room was a gross place, too. I grew up in the gang shower era, so I quickly learned to ignore females swathed in oversized towels and mind my own personal hygiene business. But random hair ties, strands of loose hair, and stains from soap, shampoo, and conditioner on the floor and walls gave me the willies.
So did the dark red, loose-weave plastic carpet on the locker room floor. Who knew how many fungi had taken up residence there, even if some bleach water had been regularly slopped on it? No way I would step on that in bare feet! Dark stains in the corners of the locker room floor or around the toilet stall walls were shudder-inducing, too. I was glad we instructors used a separate changing room.
“But, hey, all that was almost fifty years ago,” I told myself. Times change, right? And how I love to swim, lose track of time, and feel my muscles working, especially in a clean place with few people.
Everything was bound to be different in a brand new facility– better, even!
Over the weekend, I found a good tank suit at Costco and ordered goggles that came with a case, water socks, and a swim cap. I wanted to be well prepared.
The night before my first morning expedition, I wrestled with new decisions: when to leave to miss the school traffic, what to wear to facilitate quick changing, what to pack for the shower room.
I considered how many and which bags to take, what to leave in the rented locker, what to take into the pool area with me. Should I take my purse and phone and leave them in the car? Where would I leave my glasses? What about my towel? I didn’t want it to be soaked before I showered.
After a restless night, I packed two bags with everything I could think of: one bag to stay dry in the locker and one to take inside the pool area for wet stuff. Then, after the school bus had passed our house, I was on my way! The late spring chill forced me to wear sneakers and a lightweight coat, but the locker could hold the extra clothes and my dry bag just fine.
The first couple of swim sessions were generally good. I was excited about being there, even if the shared locker room set-up wasn’t ideal. Having men so close by as I peeled off my clothes to reveal the swimsuit underneath felt a little awkward. But I pushed that aside, pulled on my new water socks, and walked into the pool area with my wet stuff bag. During my laps, I had an inspiration: if I left the pool at just the right time, I could snag one of the few private shower rooms before the group class finished and those people beat me to it. The timing worked, even if the thermostat on the shower didn’t. It was warm and then suddenly icy cold. Was that planned to keep patrons from enjoying a long shower? I jiggered around with the handle and then gave up. A cool shower wouldn’t hurt me, right? Overall, though, I felt happily tired after swimming and was pleased.
Of course, there were a few new logistics my brain needed to sort out.
The water socks were a pain to take off and put on, and I sure couldn’t swim in them. Plastic slides would be better, but I had the perfect pair, so that was easy to address. Then there was the shower room floor. It was usually all wet when I arrived, which created some challenges. First, there was the issue of my pants. I couldn’t keep my long pants’ legs off the wet floor. They clung to my legs and felt constricting. Maybe next time I’d wear a skirt– weird, but practical. What about one of those wrap-around skirts I’d seen on Facebook? Maybe one would work. I ordered it. Along the same lines, I didn’t like getting my shoelaces wet from the slippery wet floor, but I didn’t want to put my towel down on it because I planned to wrap my new suit in it to take home, and then they both would be dirty. Anyway, the beach towel was too big for my bag. Maybe I’d order a swim chamois. Didn’t competitive swimmers use them? Maybe I’d just let my feet air dry.
By about the fifth time I swam, my revised system was working pretty well. That’s when things began to change, or maybe when I stopped overthinking and started noticing. As I front-crawled down my lane toward the deep end, I saw something that made me swerve hard to the right. Just before the shallow bottom began its slope, there was a glob of hair. Ewww. At 8 AM? How does that happen?
I changed lanes and tried to forget about the current I was creating and where the hair could end up.
The next time I arrived, there were brown chunks of mud on the bottom of the pool, in nearly the same spot. Mud? How strange!
“Tough it out, girl!” I told myself. “You’re not afraid of a little mud.”
And I’m not. I did tough it out, but ewww…and why was it there?
After I got out of the pool, I noticed abandoned hair ties on the pool deck. Random hair ties mean long hair has gone astray. Loose, long hair means more potential for globs of hair in the water. Ewww. Then, a movement caught my eye. A couple of men in street shoes were wandering alongside the pool. Was that where the mud came from? Did someone sweep mud from the deck into the pool? And how did the mud chunks stay together and not disintegrate in the water? Uh oh, was it really mud?
When I got into the locker room, only one shower room was available. In it, the entire floor was soaked, and dirt and tiny pebbles littered the floor in front of the sink. Who had used the room before me and left it filthy? I gathered my belongings and left in my wrap skirt, shirt, and wet sandals.
On the drive home, more of my college day memories of teaching swimming surfaced, and my brain started overthinking again. I scolded myself: “Stop being such a weenie. All these other people don’t care about some dirt and hair.”
That evening, I scrolled through Facebook and saw that I wasn’t alone in my assessment. Other members were complaining about some of the things they’d seen in the pool.
I skipped the next morning swim. And the next.
The following week, I told an acquaintance about how my new exercise regimen was losing its lustre because of the lack of cleanliness. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. And then she whispered. “You’re not the only person I’ve heard that from.”
That did it. I didn’t need another nudge. I wasn’t just being too sensitive.
That very morning, I canceled our membership. The worker checked the why-are-you-canceling box for me on the iPad form: “Didn’t use the facility.”
I noticed what she’d done. “That’s not the reason,” I said. “It was dirty.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
A couple of weeks ago, I read that canceling your gym membership is one way to save money. It seems most people don’t use the gym frequently enough to make the cost justifiable. Especially when they can walk for free or use home equipment they may already own.
“Ha! That won’t be me,” I thought. “I’m motivated!”
Ha! It was me.
In addition to being out the registration cost and a month’s membership fee, I also am now the proud owner of new goggles, a swim cap, two swim chamois, and a pair of size 8 water socks I won’t be using anytime soon.
But at least we’ll have a little extra money. About $80 each month!
I guess it’s time to unload that treadmill in the family room! It won’t be as fun as splashing my way down the pool, but I’ll have no one but myself to blame if it’s not clean.
And the only decision I‘ll have to make is which TV channel to watch while I walk.
