Wide swimmers. The plague of my pool experience. Since I swim for a while, I had time to think about it. I was more uncomfortable because it was a man, the deeply conditioned gendered experience of being a woman in proximity to physical threat from a man. While almost every wide swimmer ever in the history of wide swimmers has been an older white guy, there have been one or two women. Even though no wide swimmer presents more of a threat than a few bruises, the men scare me more. I’ve spent so much of my life being hyper aware of where a man is in space to protect myself from him getting into my space in a way that leaves a mark.

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