I went to my gym this morning for the first time in what seems like eons. When I work out indoors, it's at our campus wellness center. I literally hadn't been there since sometime in the general vicinity of March 10 last year. The gym shut down along with the rest of campus for several months, and then there was no reason to go back because why would I want to exercise indoors when I could just run outside instead? My original goal was to avoid the gym entirely until Thanksgiving -- when students left campus this fall -- but the weather stayed so nice that I just stuck with it all the way through January. Unfortunately, our unseasonably-warm winter has come to an end and we're now looking at temperatures that start with a minus sign as far as I can see in the extended forecast, so back to the gym it is then.
Unfortunately, my gym is still stuck in an April-2000 mindset when everybody thought that fomite transmission was a major source of spread. It opens at 5:00 am and closes at like midnight or 2:00 am or something, but it shuts down twice during the day (mid-morning and early-afternoon) for a couple of hours at a time so workers can go through and wipe everything down. That sounds harmless enough, except that it implies a larger population density during times when the gym is open, which almost certainly ends up making it more dangerous than it would be if it just stayed open all the time. So dumb.
Anyway, I got there when it opened at 5:00 and it wasn't too bad. I had no real problem staying away from other people, but by 6:00 it was starting to get a little too crowded for my tastes. I'm not training for anything -- all I want to do is get in a few easy runs each week to maintain enough fitness so that I can get back into my regular routine when this cold snap passes, which could be 4-6 weeks or so. Tentatively, I think my plan is get there at 5:00 maybe 3-4 weekdays per week. I am going to take weekends completely off because it opens late on weekends (again, this gym is run by a profoundly dumb manager) and it's not worth dealing with the weekend crowd just to squeeze in another easy 5-miler. If I can do one long-ish run and a couple of short runs each week, that should be fine for the next couple of months, and I think I can do that with a reasonable level of safety.