Moist Discomfort

I went swimming Monday night at Kusu's one and only health/sports center, B&G ("Blue Sky & Green Sea") as part of my preparations for next week's charity bike ride. It was too damn cold to go riding that night and the B&G pool is heated to something like 35C. It's almost too hot for real swimming, but it's a fantastic reprive from this, this betrayal by Mother Nature what with the cold snap and the running out of kerosene at my apartment and the upcoming freezing rain. Like I said before, what a tease.

The pool at the gym is outside and under a massive sealed tent. Opening the sliding doors and taking that first step inside I knew it was all wrong--you could almost hear the needle skipping off the LP in a flurry of static. Perhaps anticipating low numbers of swimmers in what is essentially still the off-season for the sport the staff had left all but one lane uncovered. The warm water steaming out of there, however, was enough to coat the tent's cieling with countless dew droplets, many of which were dropping in a constant stacatto of water meeting plastic sheeting or the exposed pool surface.

*pitterpatterpitterpatterblooppitterpatterbloopblooppitterpatter*

 It's a creepy noise, really. It was all the more creepy considering I was alone save for the lifeguard. The lifeguard. The trusty lifeguard. The (t)rusty 70-something-year-old lifeguard. I respect my elders greatly, however I question whether this woman could haul a man of my girth out of the water. Honestly though, I'm not going to drown in a pool with a depth of 1.5 meters, but maybe she'll bore a hole in my brain with her stare. Indeed, she did not stop staring at me for one solitary second. In a way I feel honored to be more interesting than the book placed neatly in her lap the minute I came in.

And that's how it continued for the next thirty minutes until I got out to face the horrible reality of this cold, dead night. The cherry blossoms were fooled a bit by that recent spat of fair weather a few weeks back and began to open up prematurely, but will they continue with the weather dropping into negatives come nighttime now? My big worry is for next week's bike trip and whether or not I'll be layering to ride. I hate that...really hate it.

--Matt