The clock above the barbells ticked past 12:45am. She stared at the whiteboard which had been sectioned into five squares with blue painter's tape. The first listed the announcements. Someone cancelled the 7:30am workout for the following day. The square below it listed the warm-up and the cool-down. The next square, the movements and prescription for that day. The largest square of the five listed the names of each gym member who had completed the workout, along with their score. The best time of the day had gone to Dusty and she was not surprised.
The gym was located at 1701 South Saunders Street, two miles south of the police department, in a sleepy industrial park. It was a standalone, rectangular building, with two large garage doors facing Penmarc Drive. It was rather inconspicuous. White with sea blue trim around the doorways. It was not the kind of gym where a person can get lost in the rows of elliptical machines, treadmills, and flat screen TVs mounted to tastefully painted walls. The only machines were the rowers, standing at attention against the south wall, and a couple of Airdynes pushed in a corner. A foreboding, black, steel structure, not unlike something found in a schoolyard, was bolted firmly to the floor in the center of the main room. The space resembled an empty mover's box, and so that's what it had been called—the box.
The box was quiet except for the snuffled breathing of her English bulldog, Fran, who had curled up in a dog bed in the box's office. Even with the door nearly closed, she could hear Fran snort as she readjusted in her sleep.
At 12:47 in the morning, it wasn't Memorial Day anymore. Christmas had spent the previous day at the police station writing case summaries and filing reports that should have been done the previous week. It had been a relatively peaceful Monday, as though the criminals of Raleigh had gone easy on the police force out of respect for the holiday. Instead of responding to calls in the field, she had quarantined herself in her windowless office with no fewer than five pots of black coffee, and tended to paperwork long overdue.
She hadn't realized how the hours had melted away until she checked the time on her phone. It was pushing midnight. Shit, she thought, as she realized that Fran had been at the gym alone since Dusty had locked up for the night. He usually fed her while checking emails after the last session of the evening. He would stay with her until she had finished and alerted him that she needed to go out one last time for the night. The last workout of the day had been scheduled to start at 6:00pm and while most warm-ups, workouts, and cool-downs were finished within an hour, Memorial day was an outlier. Memorial day meant that the gym did Murph.
It was done once a year in memory of a Navy Lieutenant who had been killed in Afghanistan. The workout was written in Dusty's blocky handwriting: For Time - 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, 1 mile run. A time cap had been set at 1 hour. Anyone still working through the repetitions when the timer hit 60 minutes was allowed to stop.
Christmas' eyes tracked toward the score square. Dusty's name was boxed off in red dry-erase marker. He had completed the workout with the 3:00pm group. His time read 36 minutes, 7 seconds. She went over to the rack of logbooks, and pulled Dusty's from the coaches' shelf. She flipped back the pages until she hit Memorial day the previous year. The same blocky handwriting read: Murph: 38:33; personal record in black ink. He PR'd it this year, she thought. She closed his logbook and placed it back on the shelf.
Christmas checked the time again. 12:55am. If she started now, she'd be finished and on her way home within the hour. She imagined falling into her bed with Fran spooned in the curve of her back. She walked to the back door and propped it open with a kettlebell. She grabbed the remote for the timer hanging above the white board and zeroed it. She gently closed the office door to deter Fran from waking and following her out for the runs.
This is it, she thought. Three, two, one. Go.