Every day I am haunted by Lionel Sanders’ pain cave pee bucket

Canadian Lionel Sanders is one of the world’s best triathletes and a force to be reckoned with in the world of Zwift racing. As one would expect, the high-ranking professional athlete has a pretty blinged-out pain cave, which he described extensively in a 19-minute video on his Youtube channel in 2019. I started watching his home gym tour a while ago but got distracted (again, it’s 19 minutes long, and my attention span is short). I only revisited it recently, and one crucial aspect stood out to me.

The 32-year-old triathlete’s Windsor, Ont. home basement renovation would make any triathlete, runner, swimmer or cyclist envious. He has treadmills, a trainer setup with a desk, a weight rack, a room with more wheels than I could count, a claustrophobia-inducing mini sauna, a stretching cage (??), a swimming erg, shelves full of nutrition and more. He also has an endless pool with a mirrored bottom that even the farthest thing from a swimmer (me) can assuredly say is: “very cool.”

Unfortunately, after watching this fun and educational video of Sanders’ amazing training setup, the only takeaway I got was the fact that he pees in a yellow Dollarama smiley face bucket.

Oh no, why

“Come on over here,” says Sanders at 4:10. “I spent all my money on the pool and was unable to put in a washroom, so I figured I need to at least have a urinal down here, because the upstairs bathroom is a long way. I went over to Dollarama and I got this beautiful smiley face bucket, which serves as a urinal.”

“So, ya, that’s a cheap way to install a bathroom.”

Maybe it’s that triathlete thing where urinating outside of a bathroom is normalized, but something about the smiling face of that bucket is burned into the back of my brain. It’s just sitting there, out in the open, in a basement with closed windows, inviting an unsuspecting visitor to pick it up and say: “Hey, what’s this for?”

What really drives me over the edge is that it looks like there’s some liquid inside of the bucket when he picks it up. At first I thought it was just a shadow but there’s definitely something sloshing around in there.

In Sanders’ defence, these endless pools do cost upwards of $20,000 so I can see why he would try to avoid spending any more money on his basement, but he could at least get a lid for the bucket.