WHAT?!

Going to the gym ruins your hearing...apparently

There's not much about a gym that's all that damaging to hearing.  I mean...you do go to that one that prohibits making excess noise and clanking stuff around.  

Ah, but that's merely a small reason people go to that particular gym.  People are mostly there to get free bagels and watch TV.  There's also "That Guy" who's there mostly to walk around and talk to people while they go through their workouts and tell them what a great workout he's going to have, but never seems to do anything.  But back to the TV watching bit...

Cardio sucks.  You're largely stationary while pretending to run, bike, climb stairs, or do whatever goofy motion an elliptical trainer is supposed to resemble.  You never actually get anywhere, the scenery never changes, and you have to do this for at least 20 minutes.  If you're like me, anything more than about three minutes of doing this kind of stuff and accomplishing nothing is roughly intolerable.  To fix this, gyms have installed tvs all over the place so you can at least watch something changing while your immediate surroundings are fixed.  When the local sports channel would show the condensed replays of the previous night's hockey game, this was about the best thing ever, but they've stopped doing that in favor of (and I'm not making this up) a TV show showing 2 guys in a radio studio doing a radio show where they talk about sports.  This is a disgrace.  Here I am, moving while not moving watching two guys on TV who are actually on the radio not moving talking about other people moving.  It's maddening.  There's precious little else worth watching at that hour of the morning, but I digress.  

Once you've decided on a channel to watch, you plug in your headphones and allow the world to disappear.  The problem here is one of three things: 

1. Either my $10 gym headphones from Walmart are far superior to everyone else's
   
2. People at the gym no longer have any sense of hearing
   
3. The gym is full of people trolling the next innocent schmuck who happens to use that particular piece of cardio equipment
   
   

Almost invariably, when I plug in my headphones, the volume is set to earth-shattering levels, most times at the highest possible setting of the TV.  I used to make the mistake of putting on my headphones, then plugging them in, then turning the volume down, but this subjects me to excess noise for a longer time than I'm sanely able to cope with first thing in the morning.  My routine now has been solidified.  I start doing whatever exercise the equipment has in mind, then turn on the TV, immediately hold down the "Volume Down" button until the output is in a less "Stadium Concert" level, then plug in the headphones.  It's better for me, but it leaves me to wonder exactly why I have to turn the volume down from max nearly every time.  I've decided it's because everybody in the gym can no longer hear.