Lane rage

I go swimming three times a week, though I am a functional swimmer at best. My front crawl is never going to win any prizes, but I can manage over 1,000 metres without drowning myself. I say this not to show off (anyone who’s actually seen me swim should realise that), but just to help you understand that I’m a middling swimmer.

My swimming pool, like many others I suppose, designates some lines slow, some medium and some fast, and usually I end up in a medium or fast lane. Unfortunately, when there’s a choice of two lanes – one slow and one medium – because there’s a school swimming lesson going on in the rest of the pool, I sometimes end up in a lane with someone going slower than I am. And herein lies my problem.

I get terrible lane rage. But it’s terrible British lane rage – I get annoyed, but don’t do anything about it. I huff and I puff when the slower swimmer doesn’t let me pass at the end of the lane. I mutter to myself in my head about how inconsiderate the slower swimmer is. But I do nothing.

In the rules, displayed clearly on the wall, it says that if you want to pass someone, you should tap their feet as you swim, so that they know you’re behind them – a water-based version of the blue flag in Formula 1. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It just seems too aggressive. So I go back to my British passive-aggressiveness.

But I shouldn’t. A couple of years ago, I posted about a bizarre and totally unnecessary confrontation on a train where a child was moving about in his seat and jogging the man behind, who was trying to watch something on his iPad. The man eventually exploded, made the boy cry and caused the boy’s mother and grandmother to start having a go at him. If the man had asked the boy early on to settle down a bit, all that yelling would never have happened. It’s the same in the pool. I should just get over myself, tap the feet of the slower swimmer, as I’m supposed to, and carry on swimming.

As I sit here, still smelling slightly of chlorine (no matter how much shower gel you use, there’s always a faint whiff left over), I’m wondering to myself how much I get lane rage at other times in my life, when I hide away from confrontation, rather than face up to things, resolve them and move on in peace. That initial conversation might be difficult and/or embarrassing, but the rewards far outweigh that one-off awkwardness.

So better the redeemed relationship than the festering wound. Better the real peace than the awkward truce. Better the tapping of the feet than the passive-aggressive front crawl.