Welcome to Gymtime Stories: Part III of a CCXIII part series.

Part III: Personal Rights vs Social Rights

I’ll cut to the chase on this one: there is this guy at my gym who is the most vile creature I have ever encountered. He is gaunt man, about 40, has a mullet, wears the same raggedy shorts and shirt with high tops from the 80’s, and has a strange crazed look about him. This alone does not make him a fell beast. The fact that he comes in and does the most intrusive exercises puts him on the vile map. He takes way-too-heavy-for-him weights, does lifts that make zero sense (eg: swings them around like a softball pitch, lifts one over his head with two hands while walking, etc), grunts like hell, and literally throws the weight down almost hitting people. Oh yeah, he also jumps on one of those bouncy balls for god knows what reason. In other words, he is an unstable and crazy man who need not exist on my plane of existence.

But he has recently added another weapon to his anti-social arsenal: body odor.

Yes, BO. This is the type of BO that permeates the entire gym. And one thing that is true about all gyms, they are not pleasant to the olfactory system at all. So imagine a stench so potent it overpowers the usual stink of a gym. It is the type of reek where you can’t ever shake it. It get’s lodged in your memory; it’s like the odor of a dead body. This BO is so thick it is it’s own entity. It may be registered to vote. I am sure he can use it to drive in the carpool lane legally. This new revelation has placed him from ‘vile creature’ to the ‘most vile creature….EVER!!’.

So I was musing that this is a simple case of personal vs social rights. I mean I guess we have the right to be foul and completely unappealing in a hygienic sense, but when does it cross the line and negatively affects others around us? I mean when he is doing his bizarre brand of cross training, others look at him and have to walk away. We all throw up a little bit in our mouths. He offends all five senses.

I seriously hate this man. He haunts me every day. I try to time gym visits to avoid him, but he pops in so randomly, who knows what’s going on? I try to work in areas he does not frequent, but all of the sudden there he is, jumping on a bouncy ball or swinging around a 40 lb weight like a damn fool.

We have to do something about this guy. To quote Spock: ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one’. I think it is time for the good people at 24 HR to meet, unite, and fight the good fight.

I just hope your gym doesn’t sign him up as a member. But better you than me…….