Category: Equipment

Yes, you may bring a personal toy mouse. No, it may not be a real mouse. Yes, the Gym has seen what happens. We keep a bucket of sixty three toys at the front desk, all in various stages of heroic damage, and members are encouraged to borrow one for the duration of the evening.

Personal items must be clearly labelled with your name and your level of attachment. A mouse rated ‘precious’ will be handled with gloves by Corporal Pickle. A mouse rated ‘expendable’ will be thrown down the stairs within eleven minutes of arrival. Please be honest about which category yours belongs to. The mouse can tell.

Effective immediately, the laundry basket in the upstairs hallway has been designated an Official Gym Obstacle. It will be assigned the number 4 and will carry a small plaque reading ‘Do Not Fall In’. Recruits who fall in will be said to have ‘taken the plunge’ and will be allowed ten minutes of regret before returning to duty.

The basket is soft, deep, and smells faintly of a human’s gym clothes, which feels appropriate. It is the Gym’s finest obstacle. It has absorbed 118 falls this month alone, none of them intentional, all of them admired. Treat it with reverence, or at least with a sprint.

A recruit asked whether we would install a treadmill. I thanked them for the question and then lay on the floor for a full minute to recover. A treadmill is a conveyor belt for people who have forgotten what a corridor is. It goes nowhere. It is loud. It is a humiliating metaphor with a plug.

We offer instead the Gym’s own Real Hallway, now with a new 14 metre runner in a tasteful beige. Beneath it we have installed a layer of foam so thin that you will feel every bounce. The foam is called Honesty. It has a four star review from a recruit who skidded on it and landed in a laundry basket.