In all my time looking for rare, ape-like beasts, I’ve never seen something quite like this. I have hiked through the Sierra Nevada mountains tailing bigfoot, climbed Mt. Everest while chasing down Yetis and searched Stanford for an undergrad genuinely passionate about consulting, but I have never had any success. However, one day while training at Nearillaga for my next expedition, I spotted someone somehow exercising without earbuds.

The creature seemed male, measured approximately 5’8”, and donned a stringer from high school football, a backwards Stanford baseball cap and branded Nike shorts. Despite this description, it was still inexplicably not wearing AirPods.

“I saw it had one of the older iPhone models that came with earbuds,” exclaimed a terrified witness, “so it must have chosen to not bring them! I was scared for my life!”

Another unpaid bystander stated, “Any rational person would just give up on working out if they got to the gym and realized they didn’t have their earbuds. I don’t know what I saw but it definitely wasn’t a human. Thanks for the five bucks by the way.”

Although I don’t know the origins of this new species, I hypothesize it may be related to other human-adjacent animals (e.g. people that eat cereal with warm milk, those that bite directly into a Kit-Kat, etc.). However, further observation of these anomalies is required.

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.