The pool lane rope

After the ninth or tenth stroke of a fast swimmer, the discs along the near line begin to nod, then sway, a slow ripple that continues well after the wake itself has gone flat, reaching the wall just behind the swimmer's hand. Between lanes it does other work too: catching loose hair, snagging the strap of a foggy pair of goggles, absorbing the width of a backstroker's elbow so the neighboring lane never quite notices. The rope is strung taut each morning with a pole that has a hook on the end, cranked tight at the anchor blocks, and by evening lap swim it has gone slightly slack again, the tension bleeding out the way tension does in anything asked to hold a line all day. Up close the discs are not uniform: some are chalky and sun-bleached to the color of a fingernail, others still hold the manufacturer's saturated red or blue, and a pool with mismatched rope is a pool that has replaced sections without replacing the whole. The cable inside is steel, sheathed in vinyl, and it hums faintly underwater at a pitch too low to place, felt mostly as pressure against the ear rather than heard outright. Regulation calls for the rope only in the middle third of most competition pools, spared from the walls, which is why the last few meters before a flip turn feel suddenly, unaccountably open. Facilities staff describe two rope temperaments: taut and forgiving. Most pools run somewhere in between, adjusted by feel rather than measurement.

Sig. Lundqvist