Vibe Check
The Saratoga YMCA pool, after 7pm.
Unpopular opinion: the pool at the Saratoga Regional YMCA’s Saratoga branch is one of the most relaxing places on earth. No, not if you go at 5am with all the hardos, or at lunchtime when all the Y’s executive staff is lurking in their offices. I’m talking about when you roll into the West Ave parking lot under the cover of night, scan your keychain card (the girl at the front desk won’t even look up), hit the locker room (why is no one talking about the fact that it’s carpeted?), and stroll into the pool area fashionably late for your 7:15, 8:00 or 8:45 lane reservation.
On a recent Wednesday evening, as I slipped into the sporty one-piece suit I bought for the swimming unit in high school gym class, still sock-footed on the cozy carpeted locker room floor, a woman asked “how was the water?” “I haven’t been in yet,” I responded, wondering if my hair was really that greasy. She said that she goes to the sauna in the pool area every night and has thought about swimming, but is always afraid the water will be too cold. (Like the Saratoga Dog Park, there’s something about the YMCA locker room that makes people want to chat.) I made the short journey to the pool, grabbed a laundry basket to store my phone and towel in, and hopped in lane two, per Lifeguard Gen’s instruction.
Now, let it be known that I am not a swimmer. Actually, on the drowning-to-swimming spectrum, I’m much closer to the not-being-able-to-keep-myself-afloat end than the actually-doing-strokes-that-aren’t-variations-of-the-doggy-paddle end. And yet after 7pm, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
Saratogian Marcella Hammer is a fellow swimmer who falls on the lower end of that spectrum and who has found comfort in late-night Y pool escapades. “I was a little bit intimidated to go when there were a lot of people who had much more expertise as swimmers,” she says. “One guy yelled at me once because he insisted I had lotion on in the pool, and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t emotionally handle this. I’m in a f***ing bathing suit already—I am vulnerable. And I am not wearing lotion, sir.’” That’s when she discovered the YMCA pool’s sweet spot. “There’s this blissful time where you have an almost-empty pool and just a bunch of hairy old white guys sitting in the hot tub doing old white man talk. It’s just beautiful.” If you’re lucky, you’ll even catch Lifeguard Eli performing his rendition of Panic! at the Disco’s “Death of a Bachelor,” as I did a few weeks ago.
So enamored was Marcella with her discovery that she went on to found the very-official “Thicc Dolphin Club,” a three-person group consisting of her, her boyfriend and her friend, that met at the Y pool between 7 and 8pm regularly pre-COVID. “Just to be in a bathing suit in public, we’re conditioned to be really self-conscious,” she says. “The Thicc Dolphin Club was just a way to be playful about our insecurity of not being fast swimmers and not being the fittest dolphins in the pool. We weren’t going anywhere fast, but we were goin’.”
While the Thicc Dolphin Club hasn’t met since COVID began, Marcella says it will return. (In the meantime, you can try to drop in on the next impromptu gathering of the loosely dubbed “Beautiful People Club,” another unofficial Y-pool-based group that has been known to meet in the sauna on Fridays at 6am, though space, is, literally, limited.) And, if the lady from the locker room is reading this: Jump in, the water’s fine.
—Natalie