The Polideportivo Gallur

Little red, white, and blue penguins. (Or, Spaniards are very athletic.)

The main entrance of the Centro Muncipal Deportivo Gallur on a sunny weekday evening

I've been planning an entry about the Polideportivo Gallur for ages.  I haven't actually used their sala de musculación, since I've never been very good about weight rooms in gyms (I never know what to do with the machines and they scare me, and stationery bikes and stair machines always seem like pale imitations of the real thing), but I've been going regularly to the pool in the evenings, and it's a lovely communal experience.


The polideportivo Gallur is famous in the neighborhood for having a covered 400 m track, which makes it much more elegant than many other public polideportivos (and makes the track usable in daylight hours during the summer, when doing any kind of field sports in the middle of the day would cause heat stroke).  It also has indoor basketball and outdoor tennis and squash courts.  It also has an indoor pool, which is relatively humble compared to its other fancy installations, but a quite serviceable 25 m long, with usually 8 lanes.  There is also a "vaso de aprendizaje" (literally a "learning glass" e.g. a kiddie pool) which is shallower, and which seems to be mostly used by adults to stretch in.  I haven't been in the vaso de aprendizaje, but it looks to be about 4 four deep.  The pool proper runs from about five feet at the shallow end to 8 or ten at the deep end (or about 1 m 40 to about 2 m 50).  One wall running the length of the pool is all floor to ceiling glass windows (and a few doors) looking out on a patio with a concrete strip about four feet wide, with outdoor showers, and then a lawn of nice green grass, surrounded by a hedge which closes it off from the street, and in the daytime when its warm is a nice place to stretch out on a towel and relax in between going in the pool.  I usually come out of the pool around sunset, and do calf stretches leaning against one of the columns by the windows, so I can look out just as the sky is darkening, at the hour when looking out the window you can see the outdoors, but also the reflection in the glass, so it looks like a grassy lawn with a little festive string of reflected flags above it, and people swimming crawl back and forth across the darkening grass, while the streetlights come on and the moon comes out and competes with the fluorescent lights in the reflection.  It's like looking at an old double-exposed roll of film, of two different pretty scenes at once.

The polideportivo is open from 9:00 AM until 10:00 PM (though the pool closes at 9:45), and in the mornings it's naturally relatively empty except for retired people.  In the evenings, when I usually go, it's packed.  There are usually two or three lanes with a helpful sign "Nado Público Rápido" and "Nado Público Lento."  The other lanes are devoted to classes of one sort or another, and inevitably have at least half a dozen people in them (if not more) who cluster at one end of the pool or the other to hear the instructions of their coach or teacher periodically, and then fan out into doing the same stroke or exercise.  I accidentally annoyed one older lady by going in a relatively empty "nado público rápido" lane a few days ago, which she had up until that point had to herself (the slow lane had at least five people in it and some of them were really slow).  She warmed up when it became clear that I wouldn't get in her way, and yesterday (after I saw her again and we again shared a lane) we bonded over the unpleasantness of the pervasive smell of vapo-rub combined with chlorine (a rather pungent cocktail of smells) due to one lifeguard's careless application of it by the pool area.  She explained that she and one other person are in the "master's level" swim, but that since there are so few of them they have not been given their own lane, but she continues to do workouts, in the hopes that they can compete.  This explains why someone who looks to be ten years my senior at least (though it's hard to tell with bathing cap and goggles) moves deceptively quickly.

In any case, today I went a little earlier than usual, and arrived around 7:00 instead of around 8:00 (so I just stretched and looked at the feral parrots camouflaged in the grass and didn't see any ghost swimmers).  The pool was noticeably less crowded in terms of public lanes, but the locker room was notably more crowded, mostly with kids who were clearly there after school.

When I came out of the locker room the concrete strip outside the pool was filled with a bunch of high school age girls all in snazzy matching red, white, and blue bathingsuits and matching caps, who were standing in two lines and seemed to be doing cheerleading motions with invisible pompoms.  (They looked like they could have been cheerleaders, except for the bathing caps and lack of little skirts to go with their uniforms.)  When they came inside I saw that their bathingsuits all said "SincroRetiro" which I gather means the synchronized swim team of Retiro (which presumably doesn't have a good nearby pool, hence practicing not anywhere actually near the Retiro).  I went in the single "nado rápido" lane open to the public, because it was much less crowded than the single "nado lento" lane.  I happened to be next door to the lane where the SincroRetiro girls headed for when they all filed in from their outdoor routine practice.  After getting instructions from their coach, they all clustered around the deep end of the pool (I was swimming by this time, so I only saw this intermittently, while doing breaststroke), and at an unheard command from their coach all dove into the water at short intervals of a count of perhaps four in between, and did a (very fast) crawl which was in fact more or less synchronized.  It was like watching people march in water.  But the milling around and diving one after the other (especially the way they wiggled under water before coming up to start doing crawl) reminded me of penguins.  Hence the little red, white, and blue penguins of the title.  After their initial drills they apparently got other instructions, because they all perched on the rope looking up at their instructor (possibly hoping for the cheerleader equivalent of a penguin's fish) and periodically would dive and go swimming off underwater.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the "nado público" lane, another class was taking place, this one for slightly smaller children (I would say junior high school instead of high school age.)  This was a co-ed group, of fifteen to twenty boys and girls, who were apparently at one point getting lessons in basic life-saving, as they were splitting a lane and each had a partner whom they dragged backwards through the water, arms locked around their victim's chest in the approved manner, while they kicked vigorously, and their partner was helpfully passive and still (at least while the teacher was looking - I saw a few pairs who started cheating and let go of each other and just hopped the last few steps in the shallow end far from the instructor).  Then they switched roles and the former victim grabbed the former life-saver and backstroked his or her way back to the other end of the pool.  After that they did a few other drills which weren't clear to me since I was swimming and looking at traffic in my own lane, and then I saw them all lined up fairly close to the end of the shallow end of the pool, where on orders from their teacher two of them started doing (fast) crawl toward the wall, and then promptly flip-turned, and headed back, then going to the end of the line and allowing the next two to start toward flip turns.  I'm not sure how flip turns and life-saving are related, but perhaps it was a general pool competence and safety class.

Later in the evening the children aren't around, but there are adult teams that practice in much the same manner, only they tend to do drills where they only kick, or only use their arms, and so on.  They are somewhat fearsome to watch.

Given this culture of early and thorough swim instruction, it is perhaps not surprising that I tend to go in the "nado lento" lane unless it is really overcrowded and contains at least one person who is very old or very young who is holding up traffic.  (By very young, I mean under eight.  Last week I overheard a brief dispute between someone who was trying to go somewhat faster in the slow lane and the mother of a small person he had passed, who was arguing that he should go in the fast lane because if he speeded up "no tengo donde que llevar a mi niña.")  The fast lanes tend to also be crowded, and while I can more or less keep up with most of the people in them, there are occasionally a few genuinely fast swimmers, and I don't want to be that person who everyone has to swim around.

That said, I do sometimes go in the fast lane if the slow lanes are occupied (as I've mentioned), and generally I haven't had problems keeping up.  (In my observation the fast lanes are divided between older people and women who are genuinely too fast for me to keep up with, and muscular young men whose machismo doesn't allow them to go in the slow lane.  If the fast lane is just two or three muscular young men, I have no problem going in it.  I know I can keep up with them, and they're decorative to watch while swimming.)  I must say that in all cases people are perfectly pleasant and friendly, and while they will occasionally pull around to pass someone who is going REALLY slowly, on the whole the lane etiquette is simply to pull aside at the end of a length and check that no one is behind you.  The one problem is that some people tend to swim a length or a lap really fast and then rest for a while.  This makes them a bit unpredictable, but more importantly if two or three people are doing it the ends of the lanes can get crowded.  As I say, people generally move aside though.

I've mentioned that I've already started recognizing a few people at the pool, who nod and smile, which is nice.  Today, since I went early, I ended up stretching and looking out the window at around the time I normally arrive, and therefore was out of the water when an older guy with whom I've a shared a lane before emerged from the locker room.  He smiled, and said "hola" so I said "hola, ¿qué tal?" back.  Somewhat to my surprise he added.  "Estás prontito hoy."  ("You're early today.")  I hadn't realized that within a week people would know my schedule to within half an hour.  Apparently they do.  I explained (honestly) that I'd had less work in the morning (no archives today), so I'd decided to try to get home in daylight, and he agreed that was a good idea, as the pool was less crowded earlier.  Then he went on to do his swim, and I finished my stretching, mildly amused by how easily one starts to fit into the pueblo and/or pool culture.

As I say, the advantage of going earlier is that the public lanes in the pool are less crowded.  The disadvantage is that the afterschool kids fill the locker rooms.  There aren't any really little ones because the polideportivo has solved the problem of "how old is too old for a child of the opposite sex to accompany its parent in the locker room?" with the novel solution of having a "vestuario masculino," a "vestuario femenino," and in between them a "vestuario infantil."  Children unaccompanied by a same sex adult (or presumably accompanied by one) can go in the "infantil" dressing room.

That does not apply, of course, to the adolescent young ladies of the SincroRetiro, who had finished their practice slightly before I did today.  It should be noted as a general truth that those who wish to shower immediately after a large group of adolescent girls (who all naturally have to shampoo and condition their hair and perform extensive ablutions) may find that there is a shortage of hot water.  I must say however that this was the first time the piping hot showers of the Polideportivo Gallur have ever been so much as tepid, and there's good water pressure too.  (Some of them are out of commission and being repaired, which occasionally leads to a line when its crowded, but the ones that work, work well.)  During my initial visits to the Polideportivo I was prepared to do what I do at home, which is essentially just rinse off and then go home to take a proper shower.  However, I was impressed by the number of people who bring not only shampoo but also shower gel and conditioner into the shower with them, and do a really thorough scrub (including removing their bathingsuits) and then apply moisturizer afterward.  The dressing rooms are communal, so privacy is non-existent, but as I mentioned, there is a lot of good hot water at the Polideportivo, and as I know from my apartment search, most apartments have individual water meters and individual gas and electric here, and we live in a desert, where water is expensive and the electricity to run water heaters is overpriced.  No one is going to turn down the chance of taking a really long really hot shower on someone else's dime (or rather for part of the price of membership of the polideportivo).  And after all, communal baths do have a long and honorable tradition in Spain (albeit a slightly interrupted one).  I don't normally do the communal nudity thing, but as it seems the standard culture, I have been happily taking long showers and rinsing out my bathingsuit at the Polideportivo also (and bringing along shampoo).  Be it said that the women who are comfortable removing their bathingsuits without embarrassment are mostly older.  Naturally all of the teenagers shower strictly in their bathingsuits, and then wrap themselves in towels and then some of them have stylish knee-length terry-cloth bathrobes that they wear to walk around the changing room.  There are moments when I am very glad I am no longer a teenager.  (I could stand being ten years younger, mind you, or even fifteen, but adolescence is a tough time.)

Generally when I emerge from the polideportivo (either into the sunset as tonight or into the moonlight) there are groups of exercise classes on the grass outside doing stretches or exercises, and a few lonely bikes locked in the nice bike rack.  There's always a steady foot traffic of people of all ages coming in and out of the gates....young men in expensive singlets and exercise clothing, and mothers pushing barefoot babies in strollers, and schoolkids with braces and book bags chatting in groups, and gray haired older people who are enrolling in the classes para mayores and so on.  It really does serve the neighborhood nicely, and with its long hours and wide array of options, I see why people are very fond of their polideportivos (and get very angry at the ayuntamiento for what they see as the neglect of their upkeep, or for raising their fees - the recortes of the years of austerity hit the polideportivos, but no local politician wants to hurt them).

I must say that when people talk about obesity in the US they tend to talk about car culture and crappy diet, and while those are definitely to blame, Spaniards are also fond of cars, and while they eat less junk food, their basic attitude that pork is a food group (or possibly a component of all other food groups) is not exactly conducive to controlling weight.  Yet there are very few fat Spaniards.  I don't think it's all diet.  Some of it is a tradition of polideportivos that genuinely offer a really wide array of sports (not just swimming) to all ages.  (Granted, people who do yoga are a self-selected group, but in my limited observation there I've seen several people who are not terribly advanced yoga practitioners, but who make up for limited flexibility with sheer physical strength.)  It's not the stereotype associated with them (though they're certainly known for world class athletes in several sports) but I would say that without being particularly cut throat or competitive, Spaniards are by and large an athletic people who enjoy exercise for its own sake.  Another nice thing about this place.