Can’t you smell that?

For gym regulars all over the world,
February’s winds are especially welcome.

With January consigned to the history books, and February soon to join it, the New Year is solidly established, and most New Year’s Resolutions solidly disestablished.

The greatest (and pretty much only) consequence of this for PPW is that standards of gym etiquette the world over are getting back to normal. Bare-ass-naked, strutting abominations are less likely to be spotted in the locker room, kit hogs on the gym floor and lane hogs in the pool have en-masse returned to their couches to cultivate their ever-spreading asses, and third-rate journalists and bloggers have stopped compiling tedious lists of pet hates about gym etiquette.

Yes, everything returns to a rather more agreeable normality.  But breaches of gym etiquette still take place. And while most are too facile to mention, every now and again they’re worth a second look.

Gym-etiquette

I hate the term “gym etiquette” and almost despair that it has come into common usage. There’s nothing about gym etiquette that doesn’t come from basic courtesy and respect for other people. You don’t need specific rules for specific situations; if you need to be given rules for manners at all you’re probably already a lost cause.

It’s about basic standards of human decency. But that said, the gym is a great place to see those standards slipping.

My “pet hate” at the gym

A lot of things annoy me in the gym but few of them warrant discussion. You can pick the bones out of the psychological dysfunctions, identify those who were bullied at school and those that weren’t breast fed; but fundamentally it all comes down to discourtesy, disrespect and lack of consideration.

Enough said.

But my pet hate at the gym is a little different. Yes it’s inconsiderate, but not in a constructive, selfish or self-serving way.

It’s smelliness.

Sweat

It’s the first thing you’ll think of and, in my experience, the last odour you’re likely to smell in the gym. Most people who work out hard enough to sweat significantly work out regularly and so shower regularly. Also they work out regularly because they take care of themselves and therefore take care of their personal hygiene. Sweat is an odour we’re socially conditioned to be aware of and so even the comparatively ill groomed tend to take action against it. Frankly I’m more likely to smell sweaty people on the bus or in the office than in the gym (and believe me, I do).

Bodily fluids

It’s not just sweat that, left unattended, will give off an instantly noticeable signature smell within a few short hours.  Feminine odours, masculine odours and the unmistakable tang of stale piss are never pleasant to have around you, but far less still when you are gasping for air while working out.

Shit

Which brings me to my all time number one pet hate – people, almost always men, who’s mothers never taught them how to wipe their own asses properly when they were kids. They head into the gym with a day or three of caked-on and ground-in filth in their ass-cracks and proceed to work up a sweat; rehydrating, lubricating and smearing that filth as they do.

Most gym users will have encountered someone walking into a steam room, or working out on the kit next to them, or who have simply left their sweaty and shitty kit in a locker that has flies gathering round it; whose faecal odour makes the eyes sting, the stomach turn and the breath short.

But it’s not the smell that’s the main problem here. It’s the shit itself.

It’s not too bad when these ordurous individuals stick to the treadmills or cross trainers, but when they decide to work up their sweat on a rowing machine or a bike – any piece of kit with a seat in fact – it takes their crime to a new level. They grind that shit-smear right through their pants and shorts and all over the seat of the kit, just lying in wait for some poor schmo to pick up on their own clothes.

So, can’t you smell that?

Mercifully the people I describe above are a hard-core minority whose numbers decrease in inverse proportion to the severity of their atmospheric crimes. But what keeps this hard-core minority going? Why do these people move through the gym totally unaware of the foul odour they’re giving off? And for that matter, what about that dirty smelling guy on the bus, or that one bloke in the office who always carries that unmistakable tuna-and-onion tang of stale sweat about him.

I think the answer is actually pretty simple, pretty innocent and pretty obvious.

There are two sides to it.

Yes, but not for long

Head to the toilet and take a dump. We all know how this goes. You get about half a minute of pungent, nose wrinkling stench and then all is clear and fragrant again. And it stays that way too, so long as you don’t go back in after you’ve left.

We all tune out the smells around us once we’ve registered them. It’s a basic survival skill; in order to be sensitive to new smells you have desensitise yourself to the familiar ones. We don’t so much notice smells as changes in smell. Spray yourself with some perfume and within a few minutes you’ll be unaware of it except for the occasional gentle reminder during the day. But everyone who meets you during that day can smell it right away.

It’s not surprising then that someone who smells of something less agreeable won’t actually be aware of it most of the time. Fair enough. But they must be aware of it some of the time. Why doesn’t the stink of shit from your own ass-crack cause you to clean yourself up at the first whiff?

Everyone likes their own brand

We’re much more tolerant of odours emanating from our own bodies than odours emanating from other people. For example, like most men I recoil at the smell of someone else’s farts, but will admit to a guilty pleasure in the smell of my own.

I suspect this comes down to our old friend the survival instinct. Foul odours from other people are a potential threat, those from ourselves aren’t. After all, you can’t catch something you’ve already got. The absence of danger from our own smells and the knowledge that we’ll soon tune them out, means we can afford to be a bit more sanguine about them.

A toxic combination

Put these two factors together and what do you get? Someone who catches a dirty smell from themselves, knows it’s unpleasant but doesn’t mind it that much and soon stops noticing it. Add in the misconception that the effect of a smell emanating from yourself can hardly be more noticeable to other people than to you and you’re left with an innocent, slightly dumb, and socially expensive delusion.

And surely the right thing for us to do is to politely tell these people that they do, in fact, stink. Surely most of them would be grateful, if painfully embarrassed at the time, to be clued in?

And, after all, it’s only a lesson that needs to be learnt once.

Well maybe. But as a 145lb 5’8″ beanpole, I think I’ll take a pass on telling blokes in the gym that they stink to high heaven as most of them are perfectly capable of sending me there. I rather think I’ll go on indulging my textbook male confrontation-avoidance, be a pussy, and quietly wrinkle my nose up with the rest of you.