survival of the fittest; Weight rooms and spinning classes today have become a Darwinian jungle where ill-behaved exercisers run amok.

Spring is here at last, thank goodness. I am exhausted by my friends' fitness regimens. In particular, their shock about what goes on in gyms and yoga rooms, the etiquette breaches, the spandex britches, the smell of the greasy . . . ahem. Half the population thinks gyms should be like libraries; the other half thinks they should be like bars. It's always worse in winter, when the exercising masses come indoors: A manners clash is inevitable.

Nothing surprises me, however. I have been on a diet since I was eleven, and exercising for so many years now that when I hear a lady friend mention a certain "Raffia Mule," I think celebrity gym trainer long before I realize she means a Manolo Blahnik shoe.

In their determination to survive as the fittest, many hard-bodied folk have turned the fitness world into a battlefield of bad manners.

Mobile-phone abuse and text messaging is epidemic in gyms, like everywhere else these days. When you connect with someone points elsewhere, you disconnect from where you are; no matter how agile you might be, you thus present a danger to the people around you, especially if you are operating heavy equipment, like weights.

Another infringement: fragrant people who do not bathe before working out. And everyone must, from pauper to princess.

Similar irritations, in no scientific order, include loud conversations in the sauna, grunting loudly while lifting, stacking weights loudly, singing loudly along with your iPod, loudly talking to your friends in the aerobics area while others are trying to proceed quietly, taking hostage with your chatter an unsuspecting social acquaintance or office colleague whom you encounter at the gym.

Hogging treadmills, swearing, reciting the plots of movies, consuming odorous foods in antechambers, wearing heavy perfumes, leaving sweat in germ pools, going to the gym or yoga studio when you have a cold or any sort of contagion, ridding yourself of blackheads in gym-floor mirrors between sets, not sharing equipment (or "working in," as it is called), not returning equipment to its proper resting spot.