High-Tech Earplugs

Before I got an iPod I used to store music on my Blackberry. I would plug headphones into the phone jack and was good to go…except for the cord connecting the headphones to the Blackberry. (I’m a moderately spastic runner who gets tangled in anything.) Then I got some fancy, high-tech Bluetooth headphones so I could listen to music utilizing the Bluetooth capability in my Blackberry, but without the complications of the cord. I set the whole thing up and tested it at home. The music quality wasn’t great: I had to turn the volume WAY up to hear it. But it was good enough and I went to bed, excited to hit the treadmill the next day.

The next day, a Tuesday, my alarm goes off at 5:30 AM, I hop out of bed and head to the gym to give my new wireless set-up a try. It wasn’t that great: with the noise of my treadmill and the various other machines around me I had the volume MAXED OUT to hear my music. I guess people around me were impressed with my wireless headphones because I got a lot of looks. [Or maybe they were just impressed with my amazing physique and incredible speed on the treadmill.] Anyway, I finished my run and shut the music off, removed the headphones and headed home to start my workday.

On Wednesday I took spin class so my Bluetooth headphones had the day off.

Now it’s Thursday. I wake up at 5:30 and head to the gym. I put the headphones on (Motorola S9 in case you’re wondering) and start the music up. I’m running and running and running and again the music is SO HARD to hear and the sound quality is so poor. The other morning gym patrons (morning gym people are typically regulars and are generally older) are still giving me looks, just like on Tuesday. I step onto the side rails of the treadmill and remove my headphones to see if I can figure out why the music is so faint and sounds so lousy…only to discover that the music was not playing through the headphones at all.

No, the headphones were basically acting as earplugs for me. Oh yes, the music was playing from my Blackberry…in fact, it was BLASTING from the small speaker on the phone.

I was mortified: I could not believe I had been irritating the other gym patrons with the rap, hip hop and dance music that I love to work out to. The looks I had been receiving from my fellow fitness-philes were nothing but disdain. I quickly packed up my belongings and left the gym in shame.

I was still completely horrified when I got to work and I emailed a colleague who I see at the gym every morning. “Hey Wes,” I wrote, “I can’t believe I had my music blasting out loud at the gym, I’m so embarrassed! I had no idea.”

Imagine my shock when he wrote back “I was digging it, loved the Jamiroquai. You didn’t know? It was like that on Tuesday too!”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. If you are a morning gym person then you know that prior to 7 AM the gym is a quiet refuge, a calming place to start the day. It is not meat-head guys and girls in sexy gym clothes hanging out and socializing. It’s for the I’m-serious-about-my-workout people who respect the morning gym etiquette. You most certainly do NOT blast rap, hip hop and dance music out of the tinny-sounding speaker on your phone for all to hear.

I took a few days off from the gym after that (self-imposed exile), hoping that the other regulars would forget about my low-tech mishap with my high-tech earplugs. And I got myself an iPod that has no speaker but does have a Bluetooth adapter so now I can run cord-free and shame-free.