Swim coaches highly encourage stretching exercises before every meet or practice. Stretching not only decreases your chance of injury in the water, but nearly eliminates injuries on dry land too. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a kid, or an adult for that matter, say, “Ouch! I just hurt myself stretching!” On the other hand, I wouldn’t say it’s not possible. So if you’re going to try to prove that point, please don’t injure yourself.
If you guessed that this is based on a true story, then you would be correct. A group of high school swimmers decided that they were going to take up dancing one day and started performing pirouettes across the pool deck. Sure, lifeguards have to tell kids on occasion not to run. And of course, high school swimmers know not to run on the pool deck. However, from a teenager’s perspective, the pool rules don’t say anything about dancing, and I don’t think they ever will, unless jumping three feet in the air over a puddle of standing water becomes a regular dance move. So while you might say this wasn’t smart, it was actually very graceful. I tried to capture that grace here and the total reckless abandon of possibly falling and breaking a limb. How did I do?
Thankfully no characters (real high school swimmers or cartoon swimmers) were injured that day because the dancing was stopped by a lifeguard before it happened (inside or outside of the cartoon panels). I think it’s safe to say that only in a comic strip where the gag is fabricated beyond reality, will an incident like this ever appear to be funny.