Pool People
New York's Hottest Club is Taconic High
This is my new summer series documenting training for the Block Island Sprint Triathlon as a race-curious, comfort-loving perimenopausal bad bitch. It’s only for Paid subscribers because I’ve never trained for a tri and so things could will get weird.
Tonight the plan was to go to the Taconic Hills High School pool and swim 14 laps consecutively.
I spoke a little about this in my first installment, but this is the school that I pay a tax of 3% of my property value to. If you do the math, you will conclude that for a childless woman it is in fact very audacious to be expected to fund the complete gut renovation of a perfectly functional football field, buy a “few SUVs,” or put in a pickle ball court. In the 90s East Lake High School’s cafeteria couldn’t even fit all the students, and no one was complaining, I’ll leave it at that.
Regardless, they want me to pay $2 cash every time I go to use the pool (yes, the high school has a pool, and two gyms). This pool has teen lifeguards. Summer hours are apparently a bit hard to staff as all the kids are on vacation or at sleep away camp. I guess jobs don’t matter anymore.
Tracy (9-months-pregnant) and I show up ready to swim at 4:30. I had to scrape together 4 quarters out of the dregs of my tote bag to make the fare as this little training ritual has wiped me out of dollar bills (my argument about the tax didn’t land with the 18-year-olds working the door).
Things felt a bit warm walking into the locker room, and even warmer when we walked into the pool. It was because of all the human breathing. The place was crawling with swimmers. I’ve never seen it so busy. Two, sometimes three people to a lane.
There was no way I could train in these conditions, not to mention the barbaric amount of floating hair that was surely making clumps directly within eyesight at the bottom of the pool. One morning we were swimming and Tracy put her life on the line by fishing a hairy clump out with her bare hands. The teen lifeguard then shuffled over in his rainbow crocs and disposed of it wearing a blue rubber glove. Your tax dollars at work.
The shallow side of the pool had two older women with kickboards (one with blue eye shadow, I c u, girl) and a smattering of young children and their parents. There was one empty, open lane marked “reserved.”
The pregnant woman asked how you reserved a lane, the teen lifeguard said it was for a swim lesson. Could we use it until that started? No. How do you say…eh…shots fired?
We waded into the shallow end in hopes the rush would clear out. I surveyed the crowd to see if there was anyone we recognized.
Of course there was The Slapper—an older, very tan man with neon goggles who slaps his arms on the water as he does his freestlye stroke, making it violent to share the lane with him and creating neighboring-lane water conditions similar to being lost at sea. There were a few older men swimming very slow, and very wide. There was a new bombshell, Michael Phelps. This man came in after us and had about -10% body fat, a TPR speedo, washboard abs (do people still say that?), and thong-style, thick, ugly-on-purpose, white flip flops. He looked like he took exercising very seriously. He set his watch. He did a few laps and then put on his front-facing snorkel. That ratcheted the total up to two grown men in the high school pool on the eve of a holiday weekend wearing front-facing snorkels. You guys:
So Tracy and I are floating around the shallow end, trying to avoid children and hairballs, when the swim lesson arrives.
