As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough Reasons Not To Work Out…

…I got stuck in the locker room at the Air Force gym today – in a car bomb exercise. The experience felt strangely familiar, like a school tornado drill, except that I had a car parked outside and theoretically I should have been free to leave at any time. In reality, I was made to go sit in the locker room for 45 minutes and do absolutely nothing.

I had made the effort to get to the gym, warm up, and had gotten about 25 minutes or so into my strength routine when one of the trainers calmly came around and told everyone to go to their respective locker rooms. Another trainer, a woman, got on the intercom and announced (a little more forcefully) that women must go to the women's locker room and the men had to report to the men's locker room, immediately. We were not allowed to leave the gym. She also gave us some more information – there was a routine training exercise going on, and the whole base was on lockdown until a (fake) gold Chevy could be located.

I was a little confused. We hadn't had anything like that at Fort Benning, but apparently it's a way of life here in Florida. About three months ago, someone brought a pipe bomb onto the base with plans to set it off, and since then they've held training exercises every few weeks to be prepared in case of another threat. One woman told me that she'd once gotten stuck in the library for five hours. Yikes. As I looked around at the group of women forced into shower stalls to wait indefinitely with only our water bottles for entertainment, however, I began to wish that I were in the library. At least I'd be able to read a book or a magazine.

After I'd spaced out for 15 minutes or so, I came to the logical conclusion to eavesdrop on the conversations going on around me, which were actually pretty interesting: A fitness instructor was reminiscing about similar drills that were a regular occurrence while she and her husband were stationed in Japan, another was discussing her upcoming move to Cairo, and someone else was talking about going back to Germany. The travel bug is helpful in military life; there's no doubt about that – but it's a curse as well as a blessing to have the desire to travel and live overseas and not be able to decide where, when, or even if you'll go, since there are only a limited number of soldiers who get assigned abroad. I started wishing Steve were in the Air Force – it sounded like they have more opportunities for foreign assignments! As soon as I had that thought, though, several people began to talk about being stationed in Little Rock, Arkansas (about half of the women had lived there at some point or another), and just as quickly I decided I was very grateful that Steve is not in the Air Force.

After 30 minutes had elapsed, the trainer got a call from whoever was organizing the drill to inform us that a (fake) suspicious package had been found in a building somewhere on base and as soon as it was checked out we'd be free to go. (Apparently the gold Chevy wasn't important anymore, and we were never told whether or not they found it. Despite the fact that I knew the whole thing was just a "war game," as the instructor kept calling it, it still made me a little nervous to walk outside after it was over and discover that I was parked next to a gold car. Luckily, up close it was a Volkswagen.)

With sleep, television, the internet and all the other excuses and time-wasters trying to steal my motivation for hitting the gym, I hadn't seen this one coming. When the trainer was finally authorized to give the all-clear 15 minutes later, I wasn't the only one lacking motivation to continue exercising. Everyone leaving the locker room was headed toward the parking lot.