Hey, go ahead, work up a sweat

Here's a little secret about me: When I exercise, I sweat like oxen plowing fields in August.

It's not pretty, and it doesn't make me smell good. In fact, I smell horrible.

Actually, it's not me, but the clothes. After a workout, their musty eau de funky locker room aroma is so pungent that getting them into the washing machine requires a hazmat suit.

I've been through the litany of laundry regimes. I've tried a serious dousing with Febreze, a hot wash with detergent and OxiClean, then into the dryer with a fragranced dryer sheet. I have tried practically every product on the market, all with the same results: The clothes smell fine when they're newly clean, but once I start sweating again, the bacteria begin to rally. It's as if I stuck some chips and salsa under their little microbial noses and yelled, "Let's party!"

So it was with a mix of skepticism and foolish hope that I greeted this recent e-mail: "WIN Products Inc. has just introduced WIN detergent. WIN is the first laundry detergent specifically designed to remove embedded sweat and odors from high performance workout apparel."

Not just mask\o7 ... remove\f7. I called the publicist, who offered to send me a bottle. I was going to give this stuff a road test.

Although my regular malodorous gym clothes would have been fine for the job, I decided to go a few steps further. I worked out, then stuck my still-wet clothes -- including a cotton T-shirt and microfiber pants -- into a zipper-lock plastic bag. There they remained, incubating for a couple of days before I took them out and washed them.

But first I spoke to the founder of the company, 36-year-old Mark Konjevod, and got the back story on WIN. The former college football player turned marathon runner admitted to having had a smell problem of his own. After long runs in high humidity, "literally I had to wring out my shirt," he said. Like me, he soon discovered that sweaty clothes plus laundry hamper for a few days equal "a little bit funky."

Clearly, foul-smelling gym wear is the dirty little secret of the exercise world. Maybe it's time we started talking about it. Sharing.

Konjevod said he'd tried every remedy possible: Three scoops of detergent per load, copious dryer sheets, hand washing, even a vinegar formula that a co-worker recommended. Nothing worked.