Up for grabs - posted at 16:02

In swimming, one has to accept a certain level of risk.... not just of drowning, not just of swimming in water that some six-year-old has invariably peed in, but of getting grabbed in all sorts of places that you would only let someone very intimate with you touch.

It's neither rare nor inconceivable, especially when doing backstroke. Hands just end up traveling in paths primed to intersect with your fellow swimmer's ass. And that's if you're lucky and he or she is swimming backstroke just like you.

Otherwise?

If your fellow swimmer just happens to be male, you'll end up grabbing his nuts.

This most recently happened to me about a month and a half ago during a Saturday practice at Chugiak High School -- not our usual swimming locale. A man I didn't know was swimming in the lane next to me and I was swimming backstroke when all of a sudden, just like I was the first prospector on the site of a lode of precious stones, I got a handful of jewels. Having been out of serious swimming -- and hence out of "it's totally ok to randomly grab someone else's balls" risk-management mode -- for about seven years, I was mildly mortified (enough to not be able to so much as glance at the other lane), but not so mortified that I couldn't immediately tell my fellow teammates all about it at the next stop.

The worst part? One of my teammates got out to use the bathroom in the middle of practice and ran into the molested man in the locker room and he decided to start gushing to my teammate about me, about what kind of swimmer I was and blah blah blah. I hear about this after practice over coffee, and of course I'm thinking that this guy definitely got the wrong idea -- it was just a harmless, random nut-grab that happens between swimmers now and then. It certainly wasn't anything that I needed a cigarette and some cheesy pillow-talk after.

Mortifying.

I was reminded of that this morning in practice. I was swimming backstroke next to a teammate who just happens to also be a co-worker when all of a sudden I feel my hand come into contact with flesh. Freakin' ALARM BELLS start going off in my head before I realize that my hand just brushed along his side and didn't do the infamous nut-grab, thankfully. Hey, random molestation was all well and good when we were in high school, but this whole work thing is a whole other story. Let's not even bring rank into this either. The consequences and implications are too horrible to imagine!

So the lesson I learned today is that grabbing intimate bits of someone else's person is all fine and dandy if you do it to a stranger, but it is bad beyond bad when you're swimming with an NCO and you risk something far worse than your standard MEO violation in the pool!

mrtl commented:

Ooooh! The come-hither nut fondling! Much better than the standard "What's your sign?" or "Your daddy must have been a thief" pick up lines.

Jitterbean Girl commented:

Y'know mrtl, I think I'm beginning to see your point. Going up to a person and grabbing choice bits of their anatomy certainly gets the message across without all of that bother of chatting him or her up.

mrtl commented:

I don't know about your swimming form, but when I've hit someone during backstroke, it's usually with the back or side of my hand. Maybe a study is necessary to see how each of the three types of contact affect what the contactee feels about it.

AJ commented:

This is sure enlightening. I had no idea that swimming was a full contact sport.