Swimming with Mrs. Michael Phelps

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I have been taking up swimming as an alternative to other aerobic exercise.  It has been a new and interesting experience.  It has, at least up until today, also been pretty fun.  Today, though, I was in the pool with a person whom I will dub, "Mrs. Michael Phelps."  Seriously, this woman was way to serious about swimming. 

Unfortunately, I cannot describe with words the things this woman was doing.  Lets just say at first, everything seemed benign.  She had one of those little paddle boards that you hold with your hands to keep you afloat, mildly kicking herself through the water.  Then, she started swimming the breast stroke.  This went okay too, except that she would swim the length of the pool 2.5 times for every one time I would.  After about five minutes of this, thing started to get out of control.  First, she did this dolphin/fish thing where she would swim underwater and do that weird thing that the Olympic swimmers do when the first jump off those little platforms into the water.  It was kind of disturbing to watch this lady next to me swimming like a mermaid. 

The worst thing, though, is when she started practicing her front crawl.  Here I am, just chugging along, and this woman comes ripping through the water at about 40 miles per hour.  The woman actually left a wake in her path.  Despite all of my paraphernalia to prevent water intrusion into my body, I was choking on water every other stroke as I was swimming in ocean-like conditions.  The pool I swim at isn't small, but it isn't huge either.  Once this woman's waves hit the walls and started moving back into the center of the pool, it was like being in some kind of simulated storm at sea.

Let me tell you, swimming in such conditions is not easy.  While this lady was making a bee-line from one end of the pool to the other, I was (being a novice at all of this), zig-zagging across the pool trying to stay in my own lane, but having a hard time pulling in gulps of breath as a result of all of the water being displaced by this woman's swimming.  Eventually, I accidentally ran into the woman while trying to prevent myself from drowning, and I must have somehow caused her to lose her groove.  She immediately got out of the pool and went into the locker room.  The last few minutes of my own swim went relatively well once the waves stopped, but as long as Mrs. Michael Phelps keeps swimming at the same time me, I am not sure I will be back in the water.