Fantasy swimming

I have to pick the time of my daily exercise at my local gym with great care. The clientele changes radically on the hour, and nowhere is the impact more profound than in the swimming pool. The pool is overrun during rush hour peak times, which are at 6am till around 8:15 am, and from 5pm till around 7:30. I'm a morning person and I make damn sure that I don't attempt to get into the pool till after the first rush is over. This is a complicated process. It means I have to go to the office first, eat my breakfast, making sure I've planned it carefully so it doesn't turn into 3 croissants from Paul (has anyone noticed how  TINY and INSUBSTANTIAL their ridiculously overpriced croissants are to anyone who has not yet had their caffeine intake?) Instead I carry around a portable porridge pot, complete it with hot water from the office kettle, down it, digest it while catching up on my email, then grab my bag and go. Just as I get to the gym, the pool is emptying while the jacuzzi is bulging. If I swam with the sharks, as it were, the pool would be heaving. This is not a big pool so more than 5 people in the fast lane, and I ALWAYS pick the fast lane, constitutes overcrowding. I pick the fast lane, by the way, as a statement of feminist aspiration. If I swim in the fast lane, generally speaking I just about hold my own, I'm usually overtaken but at least not spat at or socked in the eye with a contemptuous foot belonging to the butterfly stroke-beating person in front of me. Also the fast lane is dominated by men. Any part of life dominated by men may as well have a neon sign over its door saying, MELINDA, COME AND HAVE A GOOD OLD BASH AT OUR GLASS CEILING. If you swim in the peak period, it's dog eat dog. It is a jungle. It's kill or be killed. It's....I'm out of comparative metaphors. Basically anyone who swims at that hour is not doing it for exercise, they're doing it for competition. They are there to beat You. They have no idea who You are or how long you train for or what your issues are. They don't care if you are way faster, or so slow you should be wearing water wings in the toddlers' section. You are fair game and there to Be Destroyed. So the Fast Lane is like feeding time at the Zoo. You dive in, find your prey, annihilate them and move on. Occasionally I'm sucked into this Lord of The Flies scenario, I even enjoy it on the rare, so very rare, occasions when there might be at least one person in the fast lane slower than I am. But mostly, this is a counter intuitively stressful way to start the day. No wonder they all end up, floppy and panting, in the jacuzzi afterwards Exercise is supposed to release endorphins, not turn you into the Incredible Hulk. If I am to survive this, hold my own - then I have to transport my imagination out of the gym pool and into the Olympic Aquatic Arena, standing on the starting box next to Rebecca Adlington, or some other famous Olympic swimmer, waiting for the starting gun. It's not a gun any more actually, is it. A beep. Much wimpier than a gun but presumably starting guns were banned by the EU, along with straight bananas. Anyway. The beep goes! And I'm off!  A smooth dive, I'm first in the water, Adlington in the next lane striking out making use of her incredibly broad shoulders, but ah, I have broad shoulders too, in fact I've been broadening them for YEARS, and I inch ahead of her, just an inch, and make the wall and tumble turn without getting water up my nose and choking and spluttering which is what would definitely happen if this were not just a soap opera in my head, and I start swimming back the other way, and Rebecca's almost head to head, there's just millimetres in it, and we are supporting each other, after all we want the Brits to win Gold AND Silver, but at the same time we are competing too, and with seconds to go I push with my last reserve of energy and....I've done it!! Gold!!! Kate Middleton gives me my medal, and that's a huge disappointment as I was hoping for, well, someone just a bit fatter if I'm honest....and that's it. I'm out of the fantasy. But it's more than enough to create an adrenalin that lasts me for most if not all of the lengths that I need to do in this pool packed with Neanderthals; it helps me keep pace and thus book my rightful place in the fast lane. I'm not jeered at, kicked or intimidated, I have struck a blow for Women In The Fast Lane, quite literally. Or, I just arrive at 9am and have a nice, quiet glide.