Sweating My Way to Oblivion

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.

 

Comments

[Ed S.]

TMI!

[jeffrey McMahon]

Reading about sweat is revolting. TMI indeed. I should probably delete the post.