Confessions of a Cardio Junkie. Part One: The Problem of Sweating

Keeping adequately hydrated is a constant struggle for a Cardio Junkie like myself, a man whose sebaceous and apocrine glands secrete two quarts of sweat for every forty-five minutes of training, or about a gallon of sweat loss for every ninety-minute cardio workout. This steady sweat loss requires me to drink 10.5 gallons of purified mountain spring water a week, which, at around a dollar-and-a-half a gallon, makes for a hefty $820 annual expense. To avoid headaches, dizziness, and fatigue, I make sure to drink over two-thirds of my daily water quota before my hour-long runs on the treadmill or the equally long sessions on the Cycle Plus/stair-stepper combo, for during these excruciating feats of self-abuse, I drip enormous puddles of perspiration—sweat pools so wide and deep on the rubber mats below me that no one, gym members or management, really believes they are looking at the sweat generated from a single human being. Rather, witnesses of my salty sweat lagoons assume there is an acute water leak somewhere in the gym, a cracked pipe, a roof leak, or a faulty fire sprinkler.

Perhaps I would sweat less if I used a good over-the-counter anti-perspirant, but most anti-perspirants have the active ingredient aluminum chlorhydrate or its variant aluminum zirconium thrichlorohydrex gly, chemicals that are found in unusually high levels in Alzheimer’s patients. I have looked into alternative anti-perspirants such as rocks and crystals but was worried to find that they contain aluminum sulphate, which may or not be as dangerous as the other forms of aluminum. If the aluminum doesn’t kill you, then the salicylates will. Salicylates are found in many deodorant products. Derived from plants and tree bark, they go into the bloodstream and are converted inside the liver into toxic, longer-lasting forms of salicylates. I try to abate my sweat with less dangerous products like dusting my pores with cornstarch or splashing myself with white vinegar or by applying antimicrobial-stimulating povidone-iodine to my armpits, but these products have proven to be rather ineffective.

My sweat therefore goes pretty much unchecked so that when I run on the treadmill, the sweat flies off my head and fingers and forearms with such abundance that the people flanked to my left and right get showered with my saline fluids. I have been yelled at, admonished, cursed, threatened with being reported to gym management, given the evil eye. One man shook his head at me and, before walking out of the gym, said he couldn’t take it anymore. For the sake of my fellow gym members, I have contemplated quitting the gym and training at home, but I reconsidered this self-imposed quarantine when I realized that my sweat would inevitably peel the paint off my walls and make my condo reek of ammonia. And there is the matter of how attached I’ve grown to some of the cardio machines. Sweating the way I do apparently creates neuro-chemical bonding between man and machine so that I have developed a rather disturbing fondness for some of the cardio equipment.

Resolved to train in my communal purgatorium, I continue to run on the treadmills and manically wipe the perspiration from my head and arms and hands, but within seconds sweat is once again flying off my extremities and splattering everyone in my vicinity. Regular gym members have learned to avoid me. If they can, they use a cardio machine that is a safe distance from my body, a veritable sweat sprinkler system. Sometimes, if I deem the person to be a good soul, I apologize and make an extra effort to wipe the sweat off me. But in other cases, when the person’s body odor is rich in whiskey, nicotine, fried onions, or some other unsavory smell, or worse, if the person has putrid breath, the kind that billows in my direction while I’m trying to breathe clean oxygen into my lungs, I punish the offender by exaggerating the swinging movement of my arms in order to “throw” more sweat in that person’s direction, until he or she can no longer tolerate my sweat shower and, much to my relief, must get away from me entirely.

Using my sweat as a weapon paints me as a rather unscrupulous character, and I confess to sometimes giving in to the dark side of my soul. However, there are times when I feel that I am justified in warding people off with my sweat. For example, there is a certain gym member, a man in his seventies who, as far as I can tell, suffers from “fish-odor syndrome,” scientifically known as trimethylaminuria, which means he lacks the enzyme, flavin monoxygenase 3, responsible for breaking down fishy-smelling intestinal bacteria. In the absence of this enzyme, the human body, no matter how squeaky clean and perfumed, continuously wafts the odor of rotten fish and decomposing garbage so that anyone within a few yards will be overwhelmed by the stench. What makes this man’s condition worse is his ornery disposition. Sometimes I see him looking at people with a defiant glare, as if to say, “That’s right. I smell like shit. So what are you gonna do about it? You gonna kick my butt? Go ahead. I’m a miserable old son of a bitch with nothing to live for. Knock my lights out and see if I care.” I sense that the lonely little man feels empowered from his being able to repel the other members who cannot in the slightest tolerate the unbearable reek of rotten fish that emanates from every pore of his body. The only person who can keep the smelly man off the treadmills is me, with my hailstorm of sweat, which eventually blinds his eyes and drives him away so that he goes to some other cardio machine where he can nauseate some other poor gym member. In the war between stink and sweat, I am the victor.

However, no matter how much I take satisfaction in my pathetic and infantile gym battles, I want to make it clear here that I am not derelict in my duties regarding my sweat. In accordance with gym regulations, I towel off my perspiration from the cardio machines, but there’s nothing I can do about the sweat lakes that shimmer below me on the rubber mats. Trying to wipe up that mess would be as absurd as trying to sponge up the Red Sea. The following is no exaggeration: There is a recumbent stair-stepper that I like because it is remote from everyone and everything at the gym. I have sweat there so often that the black rubber mat beneath the machine has a bleached look, as if the strong chemicals in my body have stripped it of its color. Other times it appears there is a white encrusted salt deposit over the rubber mat. I sometimes wonder if I leave my sweat stains like a badge of pride, territorial, glandular markers that establish my possessive, almost proprietary, relationship with the cardio equipment.

My spectacle of sweat doesn’t end with my workout. After exiting the gym, I stand in the parking lot by my car and wring out the sweat from my workout shirt, watching with wonder and an almost inexplicable satisfaction at what appears to be a gallon of sweat pouring steadily onto the asphalt below. Perhaps this public display is my way of showing the world that I am a hardcore Cardio Junkie. On another level, perhaps I relish in the suggested purgation of watching all that sweat that represents my hard work, my discipline, and my commitment. And yet there is little glory in this public exhibition. In fact, I suppose most people are repulsed at what they see: A grown man hunched over, grimacing, squeezing out every last drop of sweat from his tattered T-shirt. Having done this for the last several years, I imagine hundreds of people driving their cars across the strip mall parking lot have seen me do this repeatedly. And this is all they know about me—an exhausted, middle-aged man wringing enormous volumes of sweat out of his shirt and making a puddle on the pavement. What kind of inferences do they make about me based on this limited knowledge of my behavior? What kind of pathologies are they assigning to this man who seems to relish in the spectacle of his own sweat? Often we judge people on only the behavior that they reveal to us. For example, there is a blonde, attractive, fortyish woman who can be seen from morning to evening walking all over town with her Walkman, singing to herself, pumping her arms vigorously with little plastic weights in her hands, and it is rumored, perhaps erroneously, that she suffers from something called “perambulatory schizophrenia,” which compels her to walk all of her waking life. Perhaps people think I suffer from a similar disorder, which has its own name, like “glandular sweat fetishist” or “manic perspirer fixation” or something. It’s frightening to think that people are putting me into a rather unflattering category.