Feel the Cheese

Let's all agree that running on treadmills can be boring. Those poor tortured hamsters must be seriously bored out of their teeny little minds.

After all there's only so much you can do while you're intensely focused on moving forward. Try anything more complicated than concentrating on the thumpa thumpa disco beat and that would lead to a simple yet fatal distraction, a slump, a fall... and then, the inevitable slippery slide down the treadmill.

Ugh. Oh yes, I've seen it happen, even to the best of us.

So I have my somewhat trusty iPod nano - well somewhat since it did break down once! - to accompany me with dozens of highly informative podcasts at hand. Mostly historical facts and fiction cobbled together by ingenious savants online with a smattering of cool design stuff dreamt up by brilliant DIY gurus everywhere. Anything to keep me focused on the excruciatingly painful, extremely dull task at hand.

And also some Stuff Mom Never Told You which is where I heard this. Simply bizarre but as it turns out, scientists in Switzerland have claimed that men’s sweat after a hard day's work smells like pungent cheese, while women smell like onions when they perspire. Not exactly the sweat that smells; it's the bacteria on our skin that breaks down our sweat causing body odor. Don't worry, I'm not going to explain the entire scientific mumbo jumbo but to summarize, it has something to do with the way male and female sweat differs in the concentration of sulfur.


Hunk : I smell cheesy? Really?
Paul : No problem, I'm all ready to give you a rubdown.
Hunk : That's kinda a cheesy line.
Paul : Doesn't make it less true.
Interesting tidbit to find out while I'm apparently stuck in a locker room full of men's rank-smelling sweats and shoes. Yet it intrigued me enough to sniff my own sweat-soaked shirt after a brief workout.

Golly, do I smell Brie?

God knows those busy scientists might have something there. I would have thought that diet and genes would have played a factor in how stinky a person's body odour may be but the outlandish cheese theory does play out. Ever since I found out, every other buff sweaty gymgoer who bearishly stomps by has started smelling cheesy.

Maybe it's time I started coding the different dedicated gymbots by their cheese - and yes, I do have funny stories for most of them. Camembert Chris who loves to whine piteously through every arduous rep? Emmental Eddie who conceitedly snaps a pic of his guns each time he lifts a weight?

Since we do sniff out our mates, wonder whether gay men actually have a secret predilection for cheese.