Dirty Running Shorts Enter 9th Week in Dark Gym Locker
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Photo by The Steeped Tea on Unsplash
A pair of dirty running shorts has been enclosed in a dark and poorly ventilated gym locker for nine weeks now, Dumb Runner has learned, and may be approaching what experts call “toxic levels of funk.”
The locker, at Yoknapatawpha Fitness, belongs to a local runner named Anse Bundren, the gym’s owner confirmed via email. Bundren left the shorts, soaked with sweat after a 50-minute treadmill run, in the locker on March 10. The gym closed the next day, due to a statewide coronavirus shutdown, and the shorts have been there ever since.
The shorts were “pretty ripe,” Bundren told Dumb Runner, even before he put them in the locker.
“I hadn’t showered at all that day, and my workout was intense,” he said by phone. “So by the time I took them off, they were definitely stinky.”
Bundren noted that he did not hang the shorts on a hook, opting instead to toss them in, leaving them in a moist, balled-up heap at the bottom of the locker, where they’ve now had more than two months to fester and ferment.
“I meant to take them home that night, but I guess I just forgot them in there,” he said. “Then the gym closed down.”
Experts cautioned that by now the shorts’ odor may have gone from offensive to outright hazardous.
"Frankly we can only imagine the foul conditions inside that locker,” said Bill Faulkner, PhD, a professor of smell at Peabody University. “The bodily fluids, the moisture, the dark, closed environment… it’s a perfect storm of factors.”
“We’re talking potentially toxic levels of funk,” he added. “Lord help whoever opens that locker.”
The shorts, which Faulker speculated could have somehow gained sentience by now, could not be reached for comment.
