DEC-A-5
THE BALMY DCEMBER DAYS PROMPTS THE
DISCOVERY OF A NEW RESOURCE
FOR “HEALTH AND WELLNESS” RIGHT NEXT DOOR IN GWU
The incredible weather, with beautiful, even if short, days, had prompted me to try a mid-day run. The sun rises too late and sets too early for me to get anything done outdoors before or after work, and I come and go in the dark with the automatic timer light giving me the light onto my path. So, I should resume my runs along the DC Mall up and around the Capital, right?
For some time I had been going to the Smith Center, the headquarters of the athletic programs at GWU which is equipped with locker rooms, showers, a pool, and racquet ball and basketball courts as well as fitness rooms with weights, treadmills, and the Stairmaster type cardio drills. I had been paying for this as a graduate student with my “University Fee” and already had it as a fringe benefit in my full time employee status, so when I discovered it along with the running I had done with my student Lee Dutton several years ago, I had continued the running from the Smith Center base along with several other students who were my occasional running partners. When I did not have them available, I ran alone.
So, on a very pretty day on Tuesday, after having not run since the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Chase 10 K with Joe, and having done no really serious running since the fall marathon season closed down with the good run I had with Joe in the MITP, I packed my gear, and went over to the Smith Center. I was told that I could no longer get in. It seems that the new “Health and Wellness Center” has opened in September, pride of the President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, and after many battles with zoning and the “Foggy Bottom Citizens Association”, this new “state of the art” facility is limited to the use of GWU Faculty, Staff and students—all of whom are required to purchase an annual membership to use it. This would mean a second annual fee I would have to pay for exactly the same use—a locker and a shower after running the free streets of the Capital in running routes I know very well—so, especially since I was gone at the time of the opening, and will be gone for much of the future opening hours of the facility, I elected not to respond.
But, now I am a member of this “HWC” as well. I cannot use the Smith Center—limited now to varsity athletics—so, it is the only place I can go to use a locker and a shower. It is impressive—five floors of gyms, ballcourts, and all the treadmills and other items one could want in the event of a rainy or sleety day, with indoor running tracks around the pickup basketball courts and a new pool, the only thing not yet open. I was reluctant to join yet another dues-paying “Perk”—which, like the Smith Center, Faculty Parking, Library Fees, are all “residual income” to the institution as I go traveling around the world, off-campus for over half the days of each year. But, since I am now, perforce, a member, I will confess that the facility is a good one, and may be needed much more when the weather is not as perfect as it has been recently, and I will be less inclined to make tracks around the DC Mall—where I have run freely around the monuments of “Our Capital” now looking much more like a fortified Mafioso headquarters. There has been an explosion of the most mind-numbing jobs, in which uniformed agents pace the streets or stand at the entrances of every public building. I always ran around these fellows in their engine idling vans as they blocked the cement barrier plugged access to the State Department, but now I cannot even get to the front of the Capital, without being directed to the opposite sidewalk by a uniformed squad of commandos who recognize a crazed suicide bomber when they see one—wearing a US Marine Corps singlet.
But, there would be no excuses for not running, or doing something aerobic out of doors, when it is almost picnic weather! I enjoyed the run probably even as much as I enjoyed being back out running---training for nothing, just out putting on a few miles and pumping a little iron upon return amid the students and a couple of the most unlikely faculty candidates to be using the facility. I decided that even the expense of it should be an incentive toward using it more often. I had met the manager Rick, and had talked with him briefly on my first day there, and said I would come back the next day to take a bit of a tour. I did. He turns out to be the rara avis in Washington—a real fellow, who comes from a farm in West Virginia, and is eager to get back there this weekend to do some serious deer hunting. I told him I might join him in that both here and there. So, I am exploiting the Washington weather in the last runs of the year