“Nuclear Laundry”

This is the pile of laundry I leave after a hard session of competitive tennis. “Nuclear laundry,” I call it. 

I come home, get out of my sweat-drenched clothes, put them in the laundry hamper, and take a shower. I put on fresh clothes and am finally clean. But the workout clothes are just disgusting. They have a musky, elemental smell not unlike what is encountered in my daughter’s boxing gym. It is not armpit, nor groin… but some combination of both and more? If it could, I would think the clothes should be STEAMING. They are NUCLEAR! If you leave these putrid clothes utterly drenched in sweat in your workout bag for two days, you will have to throw all of it away. It will be unwashable, unsalvageable. NUCLEAR LAUNDRY.

Here is a photo I took today on purpose to record an instance of this sort of soiled laundry, tennis towels and all:

Trust me, the medium of photography cannot communicate why that pile of clothes is “nuclear.” But nuclear it is. Rancid, malodorous, objectionable.

The same is true of this photo of me after a tennis match:

The photo does not do it justice. My shirt is drenched clear through with sweat. Same with my tennis shorts. And my underwear and socks, too. Everything is soaked straight through and sweat is dripping off me. Is as if I had gone swimming while wearing all my clothes. It will be a relief to get these clothes off. Here is another photo where I am physically exhausted from tennis, overheated from the summer sun, and uncomfortable in sweat soaked-clothes with a tennis towel that is just drenched:

After a shower and a change of clothes, and a meal to re-fuel and re-charge, I will feel like a new man. But until I get home I’m wearing these sweat-drenched clothes, yuck. I will feel like a million dollars an hour after stepping off the tennis court, but those wet clothes hanging off me meanwhile, yikes.

Here is a video of professional tennis player Inga Switatek wringing out the sweat from her shirt after a workout:

Novak Djokovic reportedly will bring up to ten shirts onto the tennis court with him for a US Open Match. It will be late August in unbearably humid New York, where you almost see the moisture in the heavy air; and Djokovic could be out there for four or five hours.; the sweat will just be dripping off his whole person. He might need all those shirts. Yikes! Sometimes those tennis players leave the court after a set to change their shorts, underwear, and socks, too. Everything is drenched and it could become a safety issue. Give them forty more minutes and they will be on the verge of sweating through the new clothes, too. So it goes. It can be brutal.

And then Novak will return to his luxury hotel and hand them a giant pile of sweaty gross laundry. They will launder those clothes, and charge Djokovic prettily for it, and he will have plenty of clean tennis clothes ready for the next day. I sometimes watch all those players at the US Open just dripping sweat, and I think about all the luxury hotels doing double time at night laundering all those nasty piles of dirty clothes. But this is the routine they do every year, and I am sure the New York hospitality infrastructure is ready and waiting to launder huge amounts of malodorous tennis stuff each night (and make a profit from it). The next day that tennis player will be back on court with fresh clothes. It is unseen work which goes on behind the scenes. “Our laundry bill is going to be enormous!” the touring pro predicts.

As for me, I have to do my own laundry. And this is perhaps my predominant memory of the summer of 2025: piles of “nuclear laundry.” I will want to get it into the watching machine soon. Through the miracle of modern technology (ie. a washer and drying machine) this heap of gross clothing will come back almost good as new in an hour or two. The clothes will be dry and smell faintly of laundry detergent. What a wonderful thing! How much harder is life when you have to hand wash your clothes? For some time after college my sister taught English in the sweltering jungles of Indonesia without electricity where she had to wash her own clothes by rubbing them on a rock by the side of a stream. She said keeping her clothes clean was almost a full-time job.

I wonder what it is like in Marine Corps boot camp: Do they have industrial strength vats to launder the floridly fetid clothes which hundreds of recruits soil with sweat, dirt, and God knows what else day after day? The Dallas Cowboys professional football team is currently having their pre-season workouts only a few miles away from me. How much gnarly smelly laundry do all those men produce each day? Who does their laundry? Do the laundry workers wear HAZMAT suits when they collect and handle piles of the stuff? “NUCLEAR LAUNDRY!” I remember reading Rickson Gracie somewhere describing the complex operation his father Hélio directed in the 1960s and 1970s to keep the mounds of moldering jiujitsu gi’s which Rickson and his many half-brothers and cousins sweat through in humid Rio de Janeiro during their intense training sessions. It must have been the laundry labor for many workers on almost a daily basis. Gross!

All the sweat notwithstanding, I have loved this ability to spend so much time exercising over the past ten weeks. I am a high school teacher and so have my summers free: that is how I have come to enjoy my 2025 summer of working out 2 to 3 hours per day. I joke with my buddies, “I can live this life of a professional athlete with multiple workouts per day, if only I did not have a job!” In the summers it is as if I didn’t have a job. When the COVID-10 pandemic hit, it was similar: free temporarily from having to teach all day, I was on my bike, in the pool, and on the tennis court semi-continuously. I loved it! Here is a photo of a fellow teacher on a run who I came across on the city streets while I was on my road bike; this was one morning during the earliest stages of Covid when school had been cancelled to prevent the spread of disease –

 – that’s a great memory meeting up with him while exercising that morning!

The fact that this COVID-break was a taste of what my retirement would look like was not lost on me. The same is true of my summer vacations. Upon retirement I can give wide scope to my workouts. My daughters will be raised, more or less. My career will have concluded. At 60-years of age I will be able to run around and play outside on Mondays and Tuesdays all day long like in childhood. When I was a kid I spent my summer vacations by leaving home in the morning to join up with friends – riding bikes or exploring in the woods, or playing basketball or baseball; laughing and playing all day long – returning home that evening sweaty, exhausted, and happy. When I returned home at night I would drink water greedily and eat food endlessly while my mom watched in amazement at the dinner table. My clothes were fresh and clean when I left home in the morning, but they were totally the opposite by the time I got back that night. In many ways I am not much different now from when I was a boy. Or maybe the core of who I was is unchanged over 50 years, but the body and mind have become distinctly different: the aging of the body, the improving of the mind; the ravages of age, the accreting of wisdom. But freed from work when I retire, I can return full circle to who I have always been. This is what I hope for, what I’m working towards. 

Because as I look my seventh decade of life in the face, I recognize a physically active lifestyle surrounded by friends and family is the best path towards feeling comfortable in my skin and healthy in my body. It is how I earn my evening’s appetite and sleep deeply at night. You might feel healthy – and even be healthy – at 30 years of age, no matter what you do. But a person at 60 has to work at it – eat healthily, workout consistently, and sleep soundly – if he wants to feel good.

So here are the reminders for myself: PILES OF NUCLEAR LAUNDRY, RICHARD! Don’t waste time and energy counting calories or weighing yourself. That is for chumps. An opportunity cost. EXERCISE VIGOROUSLY INSTEAD! That is health. Come home drenched in sweat everyday, or almost everyday, and you need not worry about getting fat. When a person is in good health and is long accustomed to daily exercise, it is a pleasure to move and sweat, usually if not always. And it almost always feels good afterwards.

Richard, Do not be one of those retired persons who watches a lot of television and imbibes numerous alcoholic drinks nightly because they are bored – they conclude, “Why not?” Be active. Be busy. Write and read like always. Keep moving your body. Be around other people. Like when you were a kid. That will keep old age away for as long as possible. “Use it or lose it.” “Rest is rust.” “Motion is lotion.” Be healthy and happy, while you can.

But alas summer is over. In three days I go back to my classroom and a new set of students. It will be my 32nd year of teaching, and the 26th in the same classroom. For the next ten months I will not have the luxury to workout so much – to soak through my clothes twice a day, to live like a professional athlete. I will be a working man again.

However, in a few years retirement will arrive. My teaching career will conclude. I will take a  pension. I will have earned it. Then I can live this active style of life until I physically no longer can. My summer vacations have been test runs for retirement. I have been practicing. I have a plan.

Just a few more years more. 

“Nuclear laundry!”

I can’t wait!