Zach vs. The Pool
February 14, 2015
High school gym was an easy class. You basically had two jobs:
- Dress
- Participate
Easy enough, right? You didn’t even have to do much participating. I know I didn’t! If you were standing there wearing shorts and looking like you cared, you got an A. In fact, most of the time I just wore my normal clothes, and they looked enough like gym clothes that I didn’t even have to change. I was really good at gym, and by really good, I meant I was good at faking participation.
Then we got to the swimming unit. The first day, I accidentally forgot my bathing suit, so I didn’t get my point for dressing. If I wanted to get that sweet, sweet participation credit, I had to walk laps around the pool barefoot for the hour.
On my stroll, I watched the other kids take orders from the gym teacher. "Give me twenty laps of the pool,“ he’d say. Then they swam back and forth across the pool TWENTY TIMES! That looked horrible! I really wasn’t looking forward to it.
That’s when I happened to wander by the shallow end, where the kids who couldn’t swim had to stay. They wore life jackets, and just kind of stood there wading around. At the most, they had to "learn to swim” by grabbing the edge of the pool and kicking their legs.
I hatched a scheme to get out of swimming laps of the pool. The next day when I got to gym class, I pulled the instructor aside and told him I didn’t know how to swim. This was a total lie, of course, I had taken swimming classes when I was younger in this very pool, but he didn’t know that. So he handed me a life vest and told me to get in the shallow end.
The next several days were cake. I splashed around and had fun in the shallow end while my fellow classmates swam to exhaustion. All the other kids thought it was hilarious and made fun of me.
Unfortunately, like all good things, my laziness had to come to an end. I soared too close to the sun. One day we had a “free day” where we could basically play in the pool like we would if we weren’t in class. So ol’ Zach thought it would be a hoot to go off the diving board in his life jacket. I bounced on it a couple of times, then did a sweet cannonball. Because I was wearing the life vest, I rose instantly to the surface of the water.
As I swam to the edge of the pool, I heard the gym teacher’s whistle.
“Hey, you know how to swim! What are you trying to pull here?!” So after a couple more days of “forgetting to bring my swimsuit,” I finally had to face the music and swim laps with the other chumps. I showed them, though. I gave up on physical fitness and became morbidly obese!