Keeping adequately hydrated was a constant struggle for a
Cardio Junkie like myself, a man whose sebaceous and apocrine glands secreted
two quarts of sweat for every forty-five minutes of training, or about a gallon
of sweat loss for every ninety-minute cardio workout. To avoid headaches,
dizziness, and fatigue, I made 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 dripped enormous puddles of perspiration—sweat pools so wide and
deep on the rubber mats below me that no one, gym members or management, really
believed they are looking at the sweat generated from a single human being.
Rather, witnesses of my salty sweat lagoons assumed there was an acute water
leak somewhere in the gym, a cracked pipe, a roof leak, or a faulty fire
sprinkler.
Running
on the treadmill, my sweat flew off my head and fingers and forearms with such
abundance that the people flanked to my left and right received a complimentary
shower of my saline fluids. I was 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 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.
There
was also the matter of how attached I had grown to some of the cardio machines.
Sweating the way I did apparently created neuro-chemical bonding between man
and machine so that I had developed a rather disturbing fondness for some of
the cardio equipment.
Resolved
to train in my communal purgatorium, I continued to run on the treadmills and
manically wipe the perspiration from my head and arms and hands, but within
seconds sweat was once again flying off my extremities and splattering everyone
in my vicinity. Regular gym members had learned to avoid me. If they could,
they used a cardio machine that was a safe distance from my body, a veritable
sweat sprinkler system.
Sometimes,
if I deemed the person to be a good soul, I apologized and made an extra effort
to wipe the sweat off me. But in other cases, when the person’s body odor was
rich in whiskey, nicotine, fried onions, or some other unsavory smell, or
worse, if the person had putrid breath, the kind that billowed in my direction
while I was trying to breathe clean oxygen into my lungs, I punished 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 could no longer tolerate
my sweat shower and, much to my relief, had get away from me entirely.
However,
no matter how much I took satisfaction in my pathetic and infantile gym
battles, I want to make it clear here that I was not derelict in my duties
regarding my sweat. In accordance with gym regulations, I toweled off my
perspiration from the cardio machines, but there was nothing I can do about the
sweat lakes that shimmered 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 was a recumbent stair-stepper that I liked because it was
remote from everyone and everything at the gym. I had sweat there so often that
the black rubber mat beneath the machine had a bleached look, as if the strong
chemicals in my body had stripped it of its color. It appeared that there was a
white encrusted salt deposit over the rubber mat. I sometimes wondered if I
left my sweat stains like a badge of pride, territorial, glandular markers that
established my possessive, almost proprietary, relationship with the cardio
equipment.
My
spectacle of sweat didn’t end with my workout. After exiting the gym, I stood
in the parking lot by my car and wrung out the sweat from my workout shirt,
watching with wonder and an almost inexplicable satisfaction at what appeared
to be a gallon of sweat pouring steadily onto the asphalt below. Perhaps this
public display was my way of showing the world that I was a hardcore Cardio
Junkie. On another level, perhaps I relished in the suggested purgation of
watching all that sweat that represented my hard work, my discipline, and my
commitment.
And yet
there was little glory in this public exhibition. In fact, I suppose most
people were repulsed at what they saw: 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 had 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 did they make about me based on this limited knowledge of my
behavior? What kind of pathologies were they assigning to this man who seemed
to relish in the spectacle of his own sweat? Perhaps people thought I suffered
from some rare disorder, which had its own name, like “glandular sweat
fetishist” or “manic perspirer fixation” or something.
Indeed, radio lovers can't be cured.
I'm perilously close to pulling the trigger on an Eton S350DL, even though I'm perfectly satisfied with my Kaito KA2100.
I should be all set. I have the perfect bedside radio, an ideal all-purpose radio, and a good pocket-sized portable. And yet I want the Eton S350DL. Sheez.
Notice the reader writes, "I should be all set." He is wrong. Radio lovers, myself included, are never "all set." There is always a new radio we think we can't pass up. We love to fall in love with radios. Sometimes we'll fall out of love with a radio only to fall in love with it, inexplicably, all over again.
I don't even know why I love radios so much. I'm not an engineer. I didn't grow up collecting radios. It's a mystery. One Fall day in 2004 at the age of 43 I walked into Circuit City on a whim. I didn't really want to buy anything with any urgency, but there it was, a blue Tivoli PAL for $130. I told my wife I wanted it and she approved. The incident seemed innocuous, but I had no idea that I had just entered the Gates of Radio-Philia for which there is no return. Two months later, I walked into Circuit City intent on buying a digital radio with presets. I was less than impressed with the speaker sound on the little Grundig radios, so I instead bought a Grundig S350. The S350's pseudo-military design ignited sparks in the reptilian centers of my brain. After that, I started reading radio reviews onRadioIntel and soon I had to get all the radios featured on the site including the Kaito 1101, 1102, and 1103. I'm sure I purchased over 50 radios and have spent around $5,000 during the last four years. I've sold many of them. I keep buying new ones.
The good news: I don't collect super expensive items like espresso machines, tailored suits, titanium watches, sport cars.
A possible explanation: I sometimes think radio lovers are looking for escape. Like everyone else, we get frustrated with all sorts of things and we feel helpless as we watch the news about our world going to hell in a hand basket. The radio is a refuge, an escape, and gives us a sense of control. I'll say to myself, "Yeah, the world is going to hell, but, wow, doesn't my Eton S350 really grab 89.3 FM with boldness and clarity!"
An annoying thing about being a radio lover: One thing that I find laughable about myself is that I see myself as having superior radio knowledge to the average person and stupidly I feel that this knowledge gives me a significant "advantage." I'll go to someone's house and sniff with contempt at their crappy Teac radio and think to myself, "What a poor lost soul. This is definitely someone who needs my help." So in fact being a radio lover has turned me into a supercilious know-it-all. How very annoying.
To conclude, I will continue to pursue my radio passion on this website, as my radio virus remains strong and there is not a vaccine or antidote on the horizon. At the same time, I laugh at myself as I am surely not blind to the absurdities of my obsession.