A day dream of a pool (and my first inclusive change room)

Tuesday, April 19, 2016



If I had to daydream a perfect pool, it would be The Regent Park Aquatic Centre. There’s light and windows and a twirly slide and a shallow pool and a hot tub and a length pool. It positively sparkles.

 The length pool was even perfectly cold (I’ve gotten so used to doing lengths in bath-water temperatures, it was refreshing, and probably made me swim faster!)

 It was also the first swim Laura and I have ever taken together! (And Rhya was swimming at the same time in a pool across town, so it was very nearly our first Team Swim!)

 Of course, we didn’t check and see what time the pool ended, so it was a shorter-than-usual swim, but the sun was shining and it was pretty much summer outside and I didn’t even have to dry my hair for the bike ride home.

AND there are inclusive change rooms, that, I’ll admit, threw me initially. It’s the first inclusive change room I’ve used and it definitely meant I couldn’t go on autopilot. Leave the suit on in the shower, LZV! I got hit on in the fast lane, and it felt uncomfortable (not quite unsafe, but not physically comfortable) to be in a change room with the man who “loved my stroke and my smile.”

 BUT, ideologically I support inclusive change rooms. For trans and gender queer folks, for parents with kids of a different gender—it’s a terrible thing to not be able to swim because of a stick figure on a door. I’ve since I read this amazing take on it: . “They take getting used to,” Meri Perra writes. “When was the last time any of us here showered with three strange men and two strange women to keep us company?”

 It takes getting used to! Yes. And I’m excited about going back to that glorious sunny window-filled day dream of a pool and getting used to it.


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Lindsay

I love swimming and finding swimming holes, and when I'm not in the water, I'm writing love letters to cities with The Love Lettering Project and working on a novel.

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