In which I am thwarted!

Now I really am laughing at myself, the last few days have been rather a chapter of accidents and this is nothing in comparison...

You know, usually I think I am a fairly realistic person, I am not especially quixotic and I am rarely disappointed--partly because I try and keep expectations deliberately low--but my eyes were suddenly opened now to the extent to which the notion that I was going to swim in Chicago has been an enabling fantasy of really almost Walter Mittyish proportions!

(That picture is most deceptive!)

I put on my bathing suit and sweatpants and went downstairs just now, and fled in horror at the spectacle! Of course the pool is fairly small (smaller, I am speculating, even than the small 20-yard ones I am kind of used to--in retrospect I suppose it is suspicious that they did not mention the size on the website), but it is also thronged with small children and bisected by various lines that bear no resemblance to lane lines--more like a Mondrian painting! Oh dear....

So I went downstairs to get a hold-in-reserve second-dinner sandwich at the restaurant in the lobby, which closes at ten (my meals have been totally irregular today and it is the only way to preempt the otherwise inevitable middle-of-the-night vending-machine raid, I cannot be eating a meal out of vending-machine snacks!), and I have come back upstairs, and since I am in my bathing suit already I think I might just venture back down and see if it is slightly less child-thronged in the last fifteen minutes before closing. If I go first thing in the morning, I can probably have a quiet swim, but if it really is impossibly tiny it might be as well to figure that out tonight and just get the extra sleep...

(Hmmm, my brain is overactively contemplating workarounds like doing a ten-mile treadmill run tomorrow morning and then having my Sunday run slot for a Riverbank swim trip, but this is ridiculous, if the pool really seems no good I will sleep in tomorrow morning as long as I can, I will have a nice run on Sunday in Central Park and it will be good for the mental health, I will just have to survive this awful Xmas holiday swimming drought, it is not good for the soul but it is a trial of patience of some doubtless admirable sort, I guess I just have to suck it up! I do not know why we grow up and believe that it is somehow good for us not to have the things we most like, but there you go...)