The trainer smelled it first. We were still in the middle of the warm-up and he was facing us. “Someone has taken a puff,” he said. I was doing spread-close jumps and still didn’t smell anything. While that exercise isn’t entirely without rectal risk, I was pretty sure it hadn’t been me.
The trainer looked at the boy next to me and smiled. “It was you, huh.” Then the smell reached me. It was a heavy, intoxicating air that kept me company for a while. The boy immediately pleaded guilty. He could not do otherwise: the fart had been smelled, named and now there was to be held accountable. ‘Sorry,’ he said heroically loudly, ‘mexican dinner yesterday. It’s those beans.’
Poop smell is always gross, but poop smell in the gym, where every cubic centimeter of oxygen is used optimally – is unbearable. For years I’ve wondered who those people are who go to the gym and sit down to shit a big pot (to avoid confusion: in the gym’s toilet). Unless you work there, you are never there for more than an hour, a maximum of one and a half hours. So why not go before or after exercise? ‘Yes’, people say: ‘if you have to, then you have to.’ But that concept is flexible, just like – coincidence or not – the anus.
Now, surrounded by a cloud of frijoles, I wished the boy had gone to the bathroom before class. During the water break, when the sky had long since cleared, the trainer briefly returned to the subject. If you are in love, he asked, how long does it take before you dare to fart in front of each other? “And don’t have to sit next to her with a stomachache.” Tough issue indeed. He himself gave the advice to go to the toilet for a while and then vent the air while flushing. I think it just depends on who you are and who your new love is. Some people still don’t dare to fart in close proximity after decades; others regularly treat their partner to a Dutch oven (farting in bed and then pulling the covers over you and your partner). The boy himself came up with a suggestion. “Or,” he leaned to the side and lifted his leg slightly, “let it go and hope it doesn’t stink.”
Fortunately, he had already forgotten that this method does not always yield the desired result.