Facing The Wall?

A while back, we had a visit from some Navy higher-ups, and things have improved around here since then. Our COLA doubled, and MWR has made a much greater effort to get new rec equipment here. (Looking forward to the paintball stuff!)

The best news for me, though (outside of the much needed COLA), was that they were going to find us some new gym equipment. The gym here is in serious need of some TLC. Half the cardio equipment is either broken or nearly there, and it's all jammed into this tiny room with some useless TVs (due to placement) high up on the wall. The rest of the gym is full of ancient weight machines that do seem mostly functional, and free weights. Clearly, whoever designed it initially (if I can use the word "design" here) was more into weight lifting than cardio.

Anyway, I spend a fair amount of time in there during the summer when it's way too hot to run outside. When I heard MWR was going to send new equipment, I was excited. (Well, okay, new to us - it actually was all used at some point at another base, but is a far cry better than the barely-working stuff they've had in there.)

This Monday, Oliver had to go help lug it all in there as the machines arrived on the barge this past weekend. I went to run later that afternoon and got a taste of the new treadmills. While they aren't technically new, they look pretty new compared to the crap we've been using in there. The one I used may actually be new, and reminds me of the nice ones they had in the gym back in WA.

So, good news there. The bad news? They used to face the doorway, which was awkward and I have whacked my knee before trying to get around the other machines. So, they turned them to face the wall, where a horribly done mural of a killer whale in the ocean is pasted. I appreciate the ease of getting onto them, but it hasn't helped the tedious nature of a treadmill by sticking an ugly mural five inches from my face. Oliver did say the plan was to get flat screens across that wall to replace the TVs that are so high up you can't watch them without falling off your machine, so hopefully this will not be an issue anymore.