I’ve started swimming twice a week as part of my official tri training. Once is with Team Fight on Thursday nights and once is on Tuesday mornings at the local county pool. It’s a pretty nice facility, and only about a 20 minute drive away, so I’m glad to have it available to me.
One thing that I’ve noticed though – once the swim team kids leave, I’m typically the youngest person at the pool. By at least a generation, if not two.
That’s right, I’m swimming with the old folks.
Which is fine, because many of them will kick my pale little behind when it comes to swimming. It’s really quite impressive to watch. And makes me think that I really need to keep up with these athletics so that when I’m in my 80’s, I can be awesome like that. Of course, I’ll need to get faster first.
But that’s not my point. The point is that there’s one major difference I’ve noticed between the swim team kids and the old ladies in the locker room and that’s body confidence.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not spending my changing time staring at other people. In fact, I choose to politely avert my eyes. It seems the nice thing to do. But you can’t avert your eyes when you’re walking from the lockers to the showers. You might run into something.
And the thing that I’ve noticed is that the teenagers do their best to keep everything covered, even with their friends. They change in toilet stalls or dress with their towels wrapped around them. They shower in their bathing suits. (I distinctly remember being just like these girls when I was younger – pretty sure I spent entire weeks at camp only bathing in my bathing suit.) The old ladies? They couldn’t care less! They’re proudly walking around the bathroom in the buff (many of them supported by walkers). They don’t care about who might be looking. They don’t care what they look like. They’re just going about their business.
Now, I’m not saying these ladies are flaunting it like they’re all that. We’ve all seen those people in the gym who think they are heaven’s gift to the world. Okay, maybe the men haven’t noticed that in the locker room, but women for sure. But these women have just come to accept their bodies. They don’t worry about what others think. Maybe that’s just something that comes with age, but I’m not so sure about it. I know my 80-something grandmother didn’t want to join a water aerobics class because she didn’t want to have to wear a bathing suit in front of people.
My point here isn’t that you should be scoping out the people in the locker room. That would probably be weird.
I’m saying that maybe the locker room is a good place to start getting over your body insecurities. You will notice all sorts of shapes and sizes in the locker room. And we’re not there to look good, we’re there to change before and after our workouts. Sure, maybe we’re at the gym to make ourselves look good afterwards, but no one actually looks good while at the gym (and if you do, maybe you’re not working hard enough). Being naked in a public locker room is incredibly revealing, and learning to not worry about your wobbly bits while you’re changing is a great step forward in body-confidence. Now, I’m not advocating strutting around like you’re hot stuff. That will just annoy everyone else. But maybe don’t hide behind your towel. Not only will dressing be significantly easier, but soon you may find you spend your pre-workout time thinking about your workout instead of worrying if someone can see that annoying bit of fat on the back of your arm.
photo credit: flattop341 via photopin cc
That’s a good idea you have, swimming with your team on your Thursday night swim. I just go to the YMCA during the open lap swimming time periods. There are two problems with that — first, the open swim times don’t seem to work as well with my personal schedule; and second, I don’t enjoy swimming laps and seem to have become very good at finding excuses to do some other workout instead. If I had a team, I’d know the people I’m swimming with and I would not want to skip sessions.
Once upon a time swim suits were prohibited in YMCA pools (when YMCAs were male only). That was still standard when I was swimming at a Y when I was about 10 or 11 (1953, 1954) — there was a thirty year gap in YMCA visits for me, so I do not know when things changed, but obviously it had to change as YMCAs morphed into the coed community centers that they are now. When I was in grad school, my university owned a campsite area with a lake, off in a rural area, that was considered by long-standing student tradition to be clothing optional.
If some of those ladies in your locker room are approaching my age, they lived through the 1960s and 1970s and may have retained some of the freedom of their younger days.