Back Issue - Gym Etiquette

Thursday 03.10.05 [6:15 pm]
Have you ever been at the gym and seen someone sweating away on a cardio machine or weight machine? Gross, eh? I've had it with the gross, sweaty people that pedal and grunt their way along on a machine, only to walk away from it without wiping it down. EWWW!!
There's this one woman in particular - her name, I won't mention, as she's rather famous in her own right and doesn't need to be made more famous by her disgusting gym habits. Anyway, whenever I am at the gym and I see her, she's already working out on "her" bike: second row, third one from the right. It doesn't matter if every bike is unoccupied - she wants that bike. If there's someone on it and the other bikes are available, she'll wait for her bike. Anyway, that's not the point. She's on this bike for hours - and I do mean hours. I've gone in, done an hour of cardio and 20 minutes of weights and stretching and as I leave, she's still pumping away on the bike. She usually brings two or three changes of t-shirts and a couple of towels to wipe herself down every 30 - 40 minutes or so. She sweats a lot.
One day, I got on one of the cross-trainer machines that was directly behind her. I had been running on my machine for not more than 10 minutes when she stopped riding her bike. I thought she was just taking a break but lo and behold, I had actually caught her as she was about to leave. I had never, in my entire 4 year membership at this gym, seen her leave. I'd see her come in and I'd seen her in the changeroom (she walks around naked - totally unnecessary!) but I'd never seen her get off her bike, gather her things and walk away. This day, I did. And I was disgusted. Imagine this girl being on the bike for two, three hours and sweating away, changing her sweat-soaked t-shirt at least twice and then packing up her stuff and walking away WITHOUT WIPING THE SEAT DOWN! Double EWW! At first, I thought she was just going to put her stuff away and come back to clean up her mess but a minute later, I saw her walking out the door, without even a glance back. Am I over-reacting here or is that gross?
Since I'm complaining about gym etiquette, I might as well add the following: people that wear wool caps when they work out (imagine the sweat that soaks into it!), people that talk on their cell phones while they work out ("Hello? Yeah, I'm on the treadmill right now. Oh, I'm on level 5 with an incline of 3.5. Yeah, I'm going to do weights after this and then do my yoga class. So, are you making dinner right now? What are you making? Oh, that sounds good...") and, this just added today, people that wear their sunglasses while they work out (unless you've just been to the eye doctor and your pupils are dialated, what's the point, exactly?).
One funny story that I must share... One day, a co-worker and I were talking about the gym. She (a tall, slim woman with a mommy-tummy) said that when she has a choice of which cardio machine to get on, she usually picks the one beside a woman who is bigger than her so she looks thinner. I laughed so hard. That night, I was at the gym. I was on the cross-trainer that was on the end of the row and there was no one else on the seven machines that were beside mine. As I'm bopping away to my music, a young, blonde girl gets on the machine right beside mine. At first, I'm seriously annoyed - I mean, come on, there are at least 10 machines free that aren't anywhere near me. And then, my conversation with my co-worker came screaming back into my head and it dawned on me: I'm the fat girl that this chick wants to work out beside so she looks thinner!!!!! I laughed so hard when I told the story to my co-worker the next day - and she laughed so hard she almost fell out of her chair. Ahh, good times....