Sunday, June 29, 2014

Horror Stories from the Gym

I worked out at the gym this morning.  After spending an hour figuring out what to wear, 30 minutes untangling my headphones

                                            

and another 10 minutes disinfecting the treadmill, I'm exhausted but forge on.  Such a trooper. 

I enter my info on the dashboard or whatever the part is called where you put in your weight, amount of time you want to exercise, speed, incline, ATM passcode, how many times a week you have sex and in return the machine tells you in red digital numbers how out of shape you are. I start my playlist on my iphone and begin to walk. 

As I try to keep up a good pace without tripping or falling off the treadmill, I look over at the gal next to me.  She's running like she's in the f*cking Kentucky Derby!


She is perspiring so much that it causes me some concern. Her sweat is gushing out of her big forehead, down her flushed face and onto the machine. She cools down and gets off, leaving beads of body fluid on the treadmill. I turn my head to see if she is going to get the paper towels and disinfectant the gym provides and clean off her sweaty mess.  She doesn't. Instead, she gets on the elliptical machine and sweats all over that, too. 

I am still walking -- now to Third Eye Blind's Semi-Charmed Life -- but feeling disgusted and disappointed in humanity when a guy gets on the treadmill that sweatgirl was using. As I have appointed myself the Head of Hygiene at the gym in the last 30 seconds, I mention to him that he might want to wipe down the treadmill. You know what he did?He chuckled! Chuckled! Like I told him a joke. My brain almost exploded from confusion.



WTF is wrong with these people?  Why doesn't sweatgirl know better than to leave her body secretions splattered all over the treadmill and why doesn't knucklehead chuckleboy care that he is going to touch sweatgirl's slop?

I believe that sweating on exercise equipment and not cleaning it off is the equivalent of peeing all over the toilet and walking away. Actually, it is worse according to an article in Men's Fitness Magazine.  A quarter-sized site on a treadmill or exercise bike in a gym can harbor 132 MILLION bacteria.  Compare that to the same area on a toilet seat -- just 500 bacteria.
Some might argue that the benefits you get at the gym outweigh the risks for disease. That may very well be but it doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions and use common courtesy along with a good, strong anti-bacterial cleanser.

On that note, looky what I found later at CVS!