the gas we pass (out)

Sometimes, when you're working out, the little gas maniacs (as in GAStrointestinal) release nasty little toots when you least expect it. Most of the time the combination of music blaring from various speakers and the mechanized sounds of exercise machines provide the white noise necessary to drown out a chorus of flatulence, but sometimes...

As in every day goings on, it's the SBD's that you have to worry about. I bring all this up because someone was working out next to me yesterday who had the foulest ass EVAH, and it was all I could do to keep from moving from the equipment upstairs to an environment of pure(r) air downstairs. One would think that the four fans blowing at us from various angles would serve to stir up the stench and dissipate it, but in this case, the cloud of nastiness hung around myself and my fellow workout brethren like a swarm of newly hatched black flies pestering an unwitting (insane) sunbather on an otherwise lovely June day in Canada's Kawarthas. No matter how many times I held my breath in hopes that the fetid smell would dissipate (and one should not, really, be holding one's breath while simultaneously increasing one's heart rate), I could not escape it.

Really, let's be honest here: if you're farting up a storm while working out and you KNOW it smells (there is no way this person could NOT know unless s/he was born without a nose, and no one fitting that description was nearby) then maybe you should go to the bathroom? Squeeze the nastiness out? Yeah, I know, it's hard to let oneself relax in a public bathroom, and even harder when the sound of your ass emissions are amplified like echoes into a vast canyon, but perhaps employing the lesser of two evils is the way to approach this matter. Wouldn't you rather suffer through a moment or two of embarrassment in a somewhat-anonymous private stall than instill the wrath of fellow exercisers as they huff and puff --deeply breathing, deeply deeply--the gaseous remains of your chimichanga?

I ran into a friend right as I was getting off my machine. She looked at me and said "lucky you, you're all done" and I said "and how, someone's got some nasty gas in here." She had noticed it too. "You'd think the fans would help," she said. "You'd think," I replied over my shoulder, hightailing it to the showers.