Mondays with Mike: Schvitz!

Doesn’t look like much from the outside.

The Thanksgiving break was welcome, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us to get out of town. But I did find an escape a few miles from home in the steam of a Turkish sauna, the desert heat of the dry Russian Sauna, and all-in-all a different world at the Chicago Sweat Lodge.

This place is old school. It’s completely unassuming from the outside, where it sits on Cicero Avenue in a working class neighborhood. It’s clean and pleasant, and it’s full of half-naked males (and only males) who range from boys with their dads learning to do the Russian bath house (bania) thing, to millennials of multiple ethnicities and languages, to short-legged older guys with enormous torsos speaking Russian or some Eastern European language. Many of these guys look like fellows you’d like on your side in a fight.

It’s an old-world, men-only anachronism. Lots of testosterone, but everyone is on good behavior. The entry door has a sign with four very clear admonitions (see photograph below).

Code of conduct at the Chicago Sweat Lodge.

You pay $30, get a towel, a locker key and number, a little skirt-like terry cover up, and shower shoes. The main corridor is lined with photos of one kind of sauna or sweat lodge or another from different cultures around the world—it’s a pretty universal tradition.

From there it’s to the locker, to the shower and to one of the saunas. They both have massive stone ovens—overall the sauna rooms look like they’d survive an air raid.

I was partial to the Turkish sauna, where water and steam are constantly flowing. Men sat in their little cover ups wearing goofy looking sauna caps (that actually really work well at keeping your head cool)–some silently, others with friends carrying on conversations, mostly in other languages.

From time to time one guy would lie down on the sauna bench and a friend would give him a vigorous detoxifying (and from the looks of it, exfoliating) rub down using a tightly wrapped bundle of oak leaves. Sometimes, instead of oak leaves, it’s a giant loofah-like thing soaked in soapy water. There are buckets and faucets all around and frequently someone would stand up, grab a full bucket of cool water and pour it over his head. (The bucket challenge was nothing new here.)

On my first cycle in the sauna, when I reached my heat limit I took a quick shower and then jumped into the icy-cold plunge pool, the equivalent, it says on a little placard, to the Nordic tradition of rolling in the snow after a sauna. It said it’s cleansing—the heat brings all your blood to your skin, then the cold makes it rush back to your organs, and then you heat up again in the sauna.

Well, I went in one or the other of the saunas five or six times, but I could only stand one plunge.

After a couple of cycles I got hungry and went to the café where I ordered pork pelmeni (think along the lines of pot stickers) served with a vinegar sauce—and while they serve alcohol, I stuck with a celery, cucumber, carrot juice blend. Both the pelmeni and the juice drink were delicious.

I was there a total of maybe 2-1/2 hours, but I left with nary an ache in my body, clear sinuses, and I felt like I’d left the country for a while. Just what the doctor ordered.

If you want to learn more about the Chicago Sweat Lodge, watch Mike Rowe get a massage from a former Russian weightlifter who works at the Lodge in this clip from CNN’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It. You can also check out this Chicago Magazine article.

Meantime, until next week,

До свидания

(goodbye in Russian, pronounced Da sveedanya)