Seems I run into a version of the "Blocker" more than I should. I'll call my guy/gal "bad judge of swimming ability person". on days when i cannot make my masters workout i will swim at the Y, typically over my lunch break. The Y is a 6 lane 25M pool, quite often during this time we will have 4-8 people swimming. Usually I am way faster than everyone else in the pool, like lap them every 100Ms faster. Inevitably when ever we get more than 6 people and sometime even before the extra person ends up in my lane. More often than not they swim down the middle of the lane. Now why in the world would they choose my lane out of all the lanes when they can clearly see that I will be lapping them every other lap? Does it not make sense to get in a lane with a person more you speed?

When ever this happens, kind of like David Bannister turns into the Hulk, I turn into the "Downer". After several times of having to completely stop, miss my interval or even slam into the 'bad judge of swimming ability person" it get so ticked off that I take the tactic of trying to intimidate the offender into leaving my lane. This involves swimming as close as I can to "bad judge of swimming ability person" at full speed with max kick creating max wake. The wake is typically large enough to fully submerge them or push them into the lane line. Usually all it takes is 2-3 of these attacks and the persons gets the idea that they should get out of my lane or continue to suffer. usually they choose breathing. Yes i know this make me a bit of an ass, and I am more than willing to share if needed. But to me it is common sense that if you are slower than a turd rolling up hill in the pool don't pick the lane with the fastest guy in it.

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I'm just a 10 cent rider on a $2,500.00 Bike

At my pool recently:

35+ strokes/25m guy - possibly the slowest guy at the pool, he almost goes backward in a sort of quasi doggy-paddle, front crawl stroke sort of way.

Indiana Guy - He just showed up one day and is the fastest person I have ever seen at a pool. He has an Indiana tatoo on his back so Im guessing he is Div I.

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"I really wish you would post more often. You always have some good stuff to say. I copied it below just in case someone missed it." BarryP to Chainpin on 10/21/06

I swim at a college pool when I'm in town and we have alot of the same suspects.
We have really fast girl that swims with no googles.
We also have goggle woman (a little old lady that dumps a bag full of goggles on the deck and switches pair about every lap) got to hand it to her though, she must be 70+ and swim at least an hour straight.
Then we have snakeman - a tall skinny 50+ year old in a speedo that slithers thru the water, he swims with a pull buoy and paddles all the time, never seen him without them. He makes those face in the water convoluted side filp turns. Really weird and share a lane, Forget about it!

i like the chubby water-runners. they hang out in the diving well at my pool, kind of bicycle-kicking along in a vertical position. sometimes i swim there for the extra waves. if you look at these water runners, who are about 15 feet off the bottom of the pool underwater, it looks like they're suspended in midair, kind of strolling along. surreal. if i were wes anderson, i'd put them in my next movie.

at the y one day, i was shaving at the sink, and a pretty old/wrinkly/hairy/wet guy sidles up way inside the personal space boundary so he could use the permanently-plugged-in hair dryer at the long row of sinks. ok. but he was naked and wet -- no towel, even. after a minute, he stops drying his hair, and gives big jim and the twins a pretty thorough drying off, too.

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"At the end he was staggering into parked cars and accusing his support-van driver of trying to poison him." A description of John Dunbar in the 1st Hawaii Iron Man

Tanya aka if my hands don't hurt you my elbow will? ouch ;-)

I encounterd a new one. Paddle and fin guy. Never swims without them on.

OH and we have -Tex and Mrs. -Tex...I look bad when they are in the water. Damn it.

I ran into a guy the other day... Mr Arrogant Asshole I call him. So does everyone else in the pool. Does the face in the water side turns to avoid talking to people. You have to just jump in the lane and start swimming, because he won't bring his face up. After sharing a lane with him for 30 min, in which we hit hands ONCE, I take a break. He swims down to the end of the lane, asks if I'm training for something.

Me: "No, I'm just getting back into shape. Not really training yet."
asshole: "Well, I'm 50 years old, and if you're comparing yourself to me, you suck."

And he swims off. People in the other lanes laugh, say the guy's an asshole. He mouths off to everyone. One really good woman swimmer said it was tons of fun circle swimming with him and 3 other people the week before.

I was just so shocked that someone would be such a blatant ass to a complete stranger. He never stuck his head up again, or was pretending to not hear what I said back.

Ugh, I hate it when people do the wierd underwater turnaround. Last summer I had to swim in 4 lane public pool and the first two lanes were occupied by senior citizens so if you could swim one whole length of the pool you were automatically in the medium and fast lanes. The fast lane was me (22 yr old girl) and a bunch of men in their 50's. They all did this wierd turn where they would scrunch themselves into the fetal position then pivot around at the wall, all with their faces in the water and totally ignoring who was at the wall and might be pushing off at the same time as their fetal-pivot.

Had two types today.

1) Woman in rather sheer when wet bikini. That would have been okay if she were tight, and 25. It's not okay if the only thing tight and 25 that you have going on is your granddaughter -- this woman was every bit of 70.

2) Cell phone in the sauna crowd. There were 8 of us in the sauna. At one point, three people were on cell phones. It never ceases to amaze me where some people think that they need cell phones.

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"You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious."

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong." -- Richard Feynman

There's a guy that bogarts an entire lane every morning, the "Snow Angel". He starts at the shallow end and walks out to chest deep then does a slow freestyle for the last 12 yards. When he reaches the deep end he hangs on the handles of the block doing leg exercises for 2 minutes (yes, I've timed him). Then he floats on his back and does this kind of making snow angels stroke slowly back to the shallow end. He'll rest for 2 more minutes then repeat. He does the exact same thing every morning and has for years.

I wish I could do a decent butterfly. When someone is being a pest in my daughter's lane she'll bang out a couple laps of fly and that usually chases them off.

maybe they just want to grab your ass. did you ever think of that?

i've got one.

incessant butterfly swimmer guy.

does lap after lap of butterfly. was doing this when i got in to swim; and still doing it 90 minutes later when i left the building.

This guy swims at my pool. Around 60 years old and 300 Ibs. Does the arms to his side psuedo backstroke with red zoomers and these saw blades (size x-large):



I can't understand how he hasn't killed someone by now. :-)

incessant butterfly swimmer guy

That guy swims at my pool too! He swims fly for 2 hours straight. He's also very grumpy. I tried to compliment him once and I said "Wow, you make it look easy.". He just growled at me and said "Well, it's not!".

Ive got one on for saunas. The pool i usually swim at was closed to i went over to the local Y, i hate it there. The walkway to the pool has the showers on the left and a glass window on the right for the 2 sauna rooms which is usually filled with naked old guys who stare at you coming in/out of the shower. Well as i was leaving i see an old guy, naked of course, on one of the benches doing crunches laying across the bench with his legs crossed in the air...over another naked old guys legs who was sitting with his back against the wall. WEIRD.

We've got an overly friendly semi-retarded guy who likes to feverishly soap his prick in the shower.

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Lewis

this has to be the funniest thread ever.

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I'll be what I am
A solitary man

We got the High Tech Hot Tub Guy, who I have seen a number of times at our club. About 60-65, his routine is to come out to the pool area with his laptop, get into the hot tub and start working on the laptop, which is resting on the pool deck an inch from the tub. He appears to be playing with a spreadsheet. This goes on for 10 minutes, then he packs it up and puts it away, followed by a few minutes of lap swim. Yep, he's living the good life and still getting the work done. Just wait until he discovers wireless. Maybe surfing the net from the edge of diving board?

"See You in the Shower Guy" - Thought he was just a friendly talkative dude. He finishes his swim 10 - 30 minutes before me each morning, depending on my distance. When I head into the locker room to shower he pops out of the sauna, takes the shower next to me and strips off his speedo while beginning a conversation. I now shower in my jammers, in less than 15 seconds.

There was a guy at the Y I used to swim at that my wife and I referred to as Aquaman since he had all the different gadgets that he would spread across the end of his lane. He was more of a combination Aquaman/Blocker/Arrogant Asshole; the pool had three lanes (slow/medium/fast) and he would always get in the fast lane when he really should have been in the medium lane. He'd swim in the middle of the lane instead of his own half if you were splitting with him, and during circle swims he'd try not to let you pass him by speeding up to touch the wall first and then cutting you off when he'd push off, only to slow down again. He got booted from the pool after one morning when the fast lane was too crowded and the medium lane had just a pregnant woman (who was a pretty good swimmer despite being far along in her pregnancy) and he told her to get her fat ass out of his way.

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"You can never win or lose if you don't run the race." - Richard Butler

I just love this thread! Thanks for reviving it!

That guy sounds like a class act, glad he got booted.

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I'm just a 10 cent rider on a $2,500.00 Bike

similar issue. A guy with license plates FSTSWMR swims in my pool, he's a little faster than I am, but nowhere near deserving of these plates. I am in the outside pool, a L-shaped pool (picture a thick block L) with 20-25 yd lanes going up-down along the bottom part of the L, parallel with the top leg of the L. The L however has a nice approx. 40 yd length going parallel to the 20-25 for the first part then going further. There is only 1 lane stripe under the first 40 yd lane and the right-most lane divider for the 20's is just to your left. You can swim to the right of this long lane, enough room for maybe 5 more swimmers, but no markers and lanes, kinda zigzag chaos. basically, the first long lane is the most highly sought at the pool and I sometimes get it at 500 am. If not, I'm not heartbroken.

So a couple of weeks ago I am in this lane and here comes FSTSWMR walking up to the lane as I swim away. As I swim away, I move over 2 feet so I am basically between the rope and the stripe, giving him the 1/2 lane b/w the stripe and the imaginary rope on the other side. I figure he'll take the hint. On the way back, I see this mass coming toward me from about 3 feet in front of my head and dart over a foot or 2 into the rope to avoid a head butt. The asshole simply decided he was going to swim dead center on the paint line. I was not in the mood for a quarrel, so I just moved over to the chaos non-lanes bc I can go straight enough.

After this, one of my swim partners show up and she says that the guy's been hogging lanes a long time. If it's any consolation, I have also heard that he used to be much faster a few years ago (when he got the plates, presumably) and has dropped to middling. So, query, when this happens do you trade in the plates to SWMHASBEEN or the like?

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