I was once on a sports team at UW. A few days ago I went on a run with a dude that is still on a sports team at UW. As with the major­ity of my bouts of exer­cise, they are often punc­tu­ated by the inter­rup­tion of having to go into the bath­room mid-work­out. We were running through the athlet­ic-y part of campus when the onset began, and I knew that relief of this situ­a­tion would have to be in the very near future in order for myself and my running shorts to have a future of much longevi­ty. So I asked my dude-bro if we could stop at the locker room so I could poop, to which he replied “Yeah good think­ing, I need to shit too.”

After enter­ing the code to unlock the door, we hustled into the bath­room-shower complex shared by the resi­dent UW track bros and soccer bros. Things hadn’t changed since the last time I was there. It was still the shit­hole it had presum­ably always been. The entire complex is lined with small beige bath­room tiles that could prob­a­bly afford to be cleaned with a pres­sure washer soon. Because there’s obvi­ously no windows, the venti­la­tion is nonex­is­tent, mean­ing the bath­room smells perpet­u­ally of butt sweat and butt poop.

There’s five toilets in the bath­room section, as opposed to zero in the shower section (this still hasn’t stopped anyone from peeing in the shower while every­one else is watch­ing). All of them tech­ni­cally have their own private stall with the addi­tion of some wall dividers, but the two clos­est to the sinks neither have doors on the stalls nor toilet seats, with the under­stand­ing that you pee in those. The other three, fortu­nate­ly, are equipped with the afore­men­tioned hinged acces­sories. There is a 90% chance that at least one of these three toilets will have been left unflushed regard­less of the time of day.

Despite how awful my old locker room bath­rooms were, it was refresh­ing to go back and reflect on the good times and cama­raderie, the kinds of memo­ries that you make with a group of people only when you’re suffer­ing togeth­er, like when you go camp­ing in the rain­for­est or fight in a war. Appar­ently the men’s track locker room is the only one with­out any wall-mounted flat screen TV now, but I guess it’s in the middle of a reno­va­tion now, so there will be some (read: multi­ple wall-mounted flat screen TVs) installed in a couple months. These will no doubt exclu­sively air Sports­Cen­ter cycles and Wiz Khal­ifa music videos for eternity.