Gym 5/10/07

Gym 5/10/07

To combat this new battle of the bulge that the mess hall has waged with
me and my waistline, I've been hitting the gym on the base near work for
the last three days. I've heard stories and seen pictures of other gyms
that soldiers had access to during their deployments and I was prepared
for the worse: dusty and dirty tents housing chipped and broken cast
iron weights on rusty weight bars that one has to guestimate the
poundage of, piles of cardio equipment that sit in a broken heap in the
corner, and soldiers bench pressing items like buckets of rocks and
smaller members of their squad to supplement the lack of weights. The
gym near my hooch (place where I sleep) is nestled in a bombed out
section of the Palace and is pretty shabby, which is why I try to work
out near work. For a deployment style gym, the gym near my "office" is
a pretty modern facility that would give some civilian health clubs a
run for their money in terms of cleanliness. The 4 TVs they have
scattered around air satellite TV stations such as CNN, ESPN and even an
Arabic version of MTV. Let me tell ya, nothing gets you more fired up
to do your next set of squats than seeing the Middle Eastern version of
N-Synch break'n it down in their man-jamies. The best part about the
gym is the showers. Nice, roomy, clean showers with all of the hot
water you can use (just don't let any get in your mouth or you'll be the
proud new owner of a mud-butt). Compared to the "combat showers" we
took in Kuwait and the rickety shower trailers near the hooches in the
IZ, the gym here is the lap of luxury. Best of all, it is surprisingly
under-utilized. That could be because everyone is too busy to work out,
or due to the fact that the base is filled with mostly Air Force folks
and everyone knows that they don't do PT. I'll see an occasional Marine
in their trying to bench press the weight equivalent of a VW Bug, but
for the most part, it's just me, my MP3 player, and music videos of
camels and burkas.

Interesting fact of the day: Treadmills run on power. Unlike some of
the stationary bike machines that use the motion of the user to power
the computers, treadmills have to be plugged into a power source. I
mention this because running on a treadmill with no power means you're
not going anywhere. Running on a treadmill that has power, but suddenly
stops because of the frequent power outages here, results in a humorous
display of stumbling and tripping that onlookers can laugh at. After
Brendan thoroughly entertained us yesterday with his very own rendition
of the "treadmill tap dance", I got to play the fool this morning when I
almost impaled myself on the heart-rate handles during a brown out.
Lucky for me, no one was there to notice.