How To Annoy Other Swimmers at the Baths

5th March 2011

If you are thinking of taking up regular swimming, here is a few notes about how to make a right nusense of yourself by annoying the other users of the facilities at the swimming pool for your own personal satisfaction. Adult swimmers tend to be a breed apart. They engage in a solitary form of excersise while keeping their thoughts to themselves. Swimming can be very contamplative and relaxing while at the same time monotonous. Because of this, regular swimmers often do mental excersise while they swim and the last thing they want to do is talk or be interrupted during each length of the pool.

Many regular swimmers like nothing better than to get through their daily allocation of pool lengths quickly and without incident. You can put a stop to this by swimming slowly in the fast lane and stopping suddenly when a faster swimmer is right behind you. Even better go in for a bit of swim-walking. This ridiculous "performance" is really hated by regular swimmers. It consists of walking along the length of the pool while flapping the hands about. Swim-walking is very popular among the obese and ladies who are recovering from childbirth.

For the first part if there is a shower provided to rinse yourself off before entering the water in the pool, never use it. Get straight into the pool covered in muck and hair products and this way you can annoy the other people by creating a bit of a filthy oil slick on the surface of the water.

Men, there is nothing worse than wearing baggy shorts in a swimming pool. They fill up with air, they create drag and are heavy. This will slow down your swimming and make you more tired. No serious swimmer would wear baggy beach shorts in a swimming pool because it defeats the object of having an efficient swimming stroke. So to annoy the other people wear the biggest baggiest and most gordy shorts that you can find.

Breast stroke - The secret to doing this stroke well is to glide throught he water with long efficient strokes. The best way to do this is to concentrate on the reach of your arms, stretching as far as you can in front with each new stroke and minimising the wasteful back end of the arm movements. So to annoy others there are a few great techniques.

• The Bob. Doing The Bob is all about bobbing your head under water with a determined up and down action, this is all that matters. It retards the forward motion of the breast stroke considerably, converting the "gliding" forward energy into the effort of repeatedly plunging the head into the water. Bobbers are never fast, but they always wear goggles.
• Dead Legs - "Dead legs" is when breast strokers forget how to do the breast stroke leg kick. Often you see the legs hardly moving or just a fragment of a leg kick. Sometimes it is quite surprising how fast some swimmers can go without legs, but most "dead leggers" just block the lane.

Front Crawl - The fastest swimming stroke in the pool. Done well this is a powerful, elegant and fast technique. Done badly it is splashy and exhausing. The idea of the front crawl is not to splash the outside walls of the swimming pool building.

Back Stroke - There are various varieties of back stroke, but taken together, "back stroke" is the most selfish way of swimming. This is because the swimmer cannot see where she is swimming. "She" because almost all back stokers are women with swimming caps over their hair. I don't know if they think it is more elegant or something.

When leaving the pool, take someone else's towel if it looks nicer than the one that you have brought.