As I would imagine is the case at a lot of gyms, there’s sort of a usual crowd to the spin classes I go to. There’s heavy-sweating super expensive bike gear guy, who has special spinning shoes and gel-butt bike shorts, and gloves, and racing shirts. There’s gazelle girl, who is at least 6 feet tall, is 90% leg, and wears little spandex shorts the size of a postage stamp. There’s grandma, who is totally inspiring and comes every week in her bike shorts and 80s era t-shirts to huff through the workout with the rest of the 20- and 30- somethings. My personal favorite is wrestling outfit guy, who wears, I swear to god, those little spandex shorts with the overall suspenders, like wrestlers wear, often with no shirt on underneath:
Hot, right?
But every week, there are a few randoms who show up.
This week, one of the randoms was: a Stealth Tooter.
Look, let’s be honest. Farting during a workout is a fact of life. We’ve all done it. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I have never let one escape while I was working hard on the elliptical, or doing my one millionth lunge.
But this was something else entirely. This was not a few isolated toots, it was a constant barrage of SBDs. (Silent but deadlies.) The corner where my bike was located developed a perma-fart smell. I found myself looking around at the people on the bikes nearby, wondering if anyone looked embarrassed, or whether I could get any other hint about the source of the problem. No such luck.
How could someone be this flatulent and not realize it or show any indication of embarrassment? Is it possible to be that tooty and not realize it in the throes of a particularly challenging workout? That thought caused me to have a brief, horrifying moment where I wondered if *I* was the stealth tooter, and just didn’t realize it.
But then, about 15 minutes before class ended, random girl on the bike in front of me got up, wiped down her bike, and left class early. And the smell miraculously disappeared. So that cleared that up.
But it left me wondering: what is the ettiquette on workout gas issues? I mean, the occasional unavoidable fart is a fact of life, but if one morning you discover that you’re really a gas machine, do you soldier on and pretend nothing’s happening, knowing that the people around you are being subjected to an awful lot of smelliness? Do you press on but acknowledge that it’s you by saying “excuse me”? Or should you just bail on the class entirely, so as not to subject your fellow gym-goers to such an unpleasant olfactory experience so early in the morning?
The title alone made me laugh.
But to answer your question, I guess if I was having questionable guts and had plans to workout that evening–I’d probably skip the group class and tight-knit free weights area. I’d find a treadmill in the corner and let it be.
Or I’d stay home and sit on the couch.
The fact that she left 15 minutes before class ended makes me wonder if she just really had to go to the bathroom and was attempting to “relieve the pressure.”
If I was having gas issues, I try my hardest to not let one go in front of people. Or I’d try to pass it off as a guy doing it.
Me, I would avoid class if I was particular gassy. If it happened in the middle of class, I would have walke dout.
wow, i’m not sure what i’d have done. i’ve never really experienced 45 straight minutes of tootage before.. it’s sort of get-out-and-get-it-over-with situation for me, i think? and in that case, i tend to look indignantly around me to try to put suspicion on my neighbors
As someone with a long history of tum trubs, I can only imagine she either:
1) is TOTALLY overdoing the whole fitness thing and is suddenly eating WAY healthy and her body is kinda freaking out a bit.
2) she feels like crap (HA!) and has some sort of medical issue where working out will help her. Like, getting things moving along if you know what I mean and I think you do.
But dude, the best place to toot is on the track because you’re never in the same place and all the people running causes a breeze, thus dispersing the cloud of poot. You should let her know.
I don’t know, but it sounds to me like she was having some intestinal issues that should have been resolved, you know? Like 45 minutes of tooting means she should leave the class for her own sake as well as that of those around her.
yeah.
one or two or even THREE SBD’s are okay….
but seriously…if you are just falling short of crapping your pants, you should LEAVE class like she did. I think she thought they would stop at some point and then when she realized there was no end in site…she gave up and left.