Gym Time!

I have many reasons for not liking the gym.  One of my top reasons is that I feel the gym is a place of judgment.  As soon as I walk through the door, I can detect a hundred eyes turning my direction and making snap judgments.  It takes a lot of false motivation to get myself into a gym.  I love the workout, and I love the results, but I absolutely hate going to the gym.

I made it into the gym yesterday after a lot of self convincing.  The new LT and I exchanged shifts for a day leaving me with an afternoon of time to accomplish anything my heart desired.  As I walked through the gym doors, I ducked my head down, dodging weightlifters as I made a bee-line for the sign-in table to obtain a key for a treadmill.  I was lucky enough to sign up for the very last treadmill available.  I hopped on and started my warm up as I untangled my iPod headphones and chose a playlist.  Every couple of minutes, as I felt ready, I would increase my pace until I arrived at a pace that was a challenge but not too difficult.  As I reached my optimal pace, my hair which was in a tight little bun, decided it wanted to stretch and join the workout.  I resolved to continue my run and fix my hair when my workout was complete.  This solution made sense in my head seeing as my hair was not hurting anything and I was contained in a gym.  For those of you who are not aware, the military has a policy about hair which limits you to a bun.  This is not the exact wording from the regulation, but you get the idea. 

I was towards the end of my workout, but not quite to cool down mode when a female in Army PT’s approached my treadmill.  I was not sure what to make of her arrival to my treadmill because there were other treadmills available.  If she was here to tell me to fix my hair, I better start calming down now.  I knew I couldn’t argue with this woman because of a recent incident involving a fellow CPT and his five toe shoes.  Long story short, Army personnel are not allowed to wear the five toe shoes for PT while in uniform.  He worked out with the COL on one occasion and the COL did not say anything about him wearing his five toe shoes.  He went to workout with an E5 a few weeks later and a female Sergeant Major approached him saying he was not authorized to wear those shoes.  Instead of making the correction, he told the SGM that his COL told him he could wear these shoes for PT.  She took his name, rank, unit, and COL’s name and took action.  Much to say, the COL was not happy with this CPT.

I started thinking of courses of action to take with this situation that wouldn’t land me in the COL’s office.  She advanced to the side of my treadmill and I ignored her presence focusing on running, the TV’s in the distance, and my music.  She reached out to touch my elbow and I ignored that too.  It didn’t look like the gym was on fire, so I saw no need to treat her efforts at grabbing my attention as an emergency.  She finally approached the front of the treadmill.  We stared at each other as I ran.  She pointed to her ears in an attempt to communicate that she wanted me to remove my headphones.  I looked her up and down with a quizzical look on my face so she would think I was just confused by her gesture.  She was not a large woman, but she was not small, petite, or even close to making the Army height/weight standards. 

I was not going to be able to evade her correcting me about my hair, I could tell by looking at her.  So I decided to politely have a little fun.  I turned off my treadmill, took out my ear buds, grabbed my towel and looked at her. 

In my best innocent voice I said, “Oh, did you want to use this treadmill?” 

I put my stuff on the floor and started stretching while I fixed my hair. 

She started to say, “Oh, no, I just wanted…” 

I cut her off, “You just have to sign for it at that table down there.  I will walk you down there so you can have this one.”  I said as I grabbed the emergency stop key to take back to the sign in table.  She looked like I had thrown her off guard and followed me to the table.

“Do I know you, you look really familiar” I said as I guided her to the table to turn in my treadmill key. 

I walked her all the way to the sign-in table, turned my key in, and directed her to sign in before she piped up with, “Oh, no, I just wanted you to fix your hair.”

“Oh, is there something wrong with it?”  I said as I reached up and grabbed my bun.

“You fixed it now, but it was down when you were running.”

“Oh, yea, that doesn’t happen to you?”

Avoiding a response I quickly looked at my watch, touched her arm and said, “I have to go, but thank you for stopping my workout, otherwise I would have been late!”

I ran off.  It was a lie, but it was the best way to end the conversation.  My cool down was a jog back to my room followed by a good abdominal workout. 

My roommate and I got a good laugh about it later.  She agreed that was the best way to handle it since she would have gone off on the poor woman.

We will add this to the list of reasons why I don’t like going to the gym.