There’s a Running Club here. But not what you’re thinking: it’s not a group of us getting together to run, but rather a computer with which you get a login/password. You log your individual running during your deployment.

There are incentive t-shirts starting at 200 miles. There are more gifts if you hit 500 and 1000 miles, but I doubt that’s going to happen while I’m here. I might be wrong, but I think I saw a GPS running watch in the glass case displaying the incentives. Probably for 1000 miles!

I’m here for about 13 weeks, so I did some math (again):

200 miles / 13 weeks = 15.38 miles per week. ~2.2 miles per day.

Could I do that?

I think so. I’ve been here 15 days so far and I’ve run 36 miles. That’s 2.4 miles per day, so I’m cruising right along, right?

I’ve taken a couple runs outside, but the weather has been a challenge. The temperatures are great — I do my runs in the morning after work, so it’s typically in the 50s here. It’s the wind and blowing dust that’s getting on my nerves. After my last outdoor run, when visibilities were around 3 miles from suspended dust, there was a film of dirt on my teeth. It was grosser than gross.

For the most part I’m doing this on a treadmill. It’s not bad, about what you’d expect from a decent gym…our treadmills here have “Broadcast Vision”, meaning you can plug in your headphones and enjoy the station of your choice from a bank of TVs. I haven’t talked about the television programming we get here.

So there’s my fitness plan. I still haven’t gotten into eating habits here yet, mainly because of photography challenges. Most of this base forbids photography, including the dining hall I use most of the time, near the facility where I work. I might just have to paint a picture with words.