The Fire Hall Treadmill Was Older Than Our Youngest Volunteer

The morning Denny sat down on the hose

I milk cows three mornings a week for the Hostetler family outside our town in Holmes County, Ohio. The other part of my life belongs to the volunteer fire department. I have been on the roster for nineteen years.

What I did not know, until a Saturday in late March, was how close any of us were to falling over.

We were running a hose advance drill behind the old grain elevator. Full turnout gear, air packs on, dragging a charged line up a set of wooden steps we built ourselves years ago. Denny Raber went up second. Denny is fifty-four, runs a small engine repair shop, and has been on the department longer than I have. Halfway up he stopped, sat down on the hose like it was a park bench, and said in a very calm voice that his left arm felt wrong.

He was lucky. Our assistant chief is a paramedic, the squad was parked forty feet away, and the hospital in Millersburg had him in a cath lab before lunch. Two stents. He came home on the Tuesday and phoned me on the Wednesday to apologise for ruining the drill, which tells you everything you need to know about Denny.

Nobody wanted to say it out loud

At the next monthly meeting I looked around the folding tables. We had a retired schoolteacher, two brothers who farm together, a girl of nineteen who had just finished her certification, a pastor, a welder, and me. Half of us carried more weight than we had at our weddings.

The chief said we should have somewhere to train. Heart trouble, not flames, takes most of us, he said. Then he looked straight at me. I think it was because I had been the one to call Denny's wife from the scene, and somehow that made me responsible for the whole idea. I said I did not know the first thing about gyms. He said neither did anybody else, so I was as qualified as the next person.

What we already had

The fire hall has a back room that used to be the radio room before dispatch went county wide. In it, under a tarp, sat a treadmill that a member's widow donated in 1994. Our youngest volunteer, Kaylee, was born years after it arrived. The belt slipped every time you got above a brisk walk, and it made a smell like hot toast.

Beside it was a weight bench with a split vinyl seat held together by silver duct tape, and a set of dumbbells in mismatched pairs that somebody had cleared out of a basement. That was the whole kingdom.

The pancake breakfast

Our department funds almost everything with food, and the spring pancake breakfast is the one the whole township turns up for. This year the chief agreed that every dollar from the breakfast would go to the training room.

I have never flipped so many pancakes in my life. We started the griddles at five in the morning. Denny came too, under strict instruction from his wife to sit down and only take the money, and he sat at the door with a cash box and told every single person who came through exactly what the stents looked like on the screen.

We raised just over three thousand four hundred dollars. For a small township, that is a lot of syrup.

Learning to shop like a farmer

Three thousand four hundred dollars buys you about one good new treadmill. I knew from the dairy that you do not buy a new milking unit if a good used one will do the job, so I took the same approach. I started searching for used gym equipment the way I would search for a second hand bulk tank: slowly, with a lot of suspicion, and asking everyone I knew what they had paid.

The welder on our crew, Marcus, turned out to be a quiet expert. He had been lifting in his garage since high school and told me that the machines in big commercial gyms are built to be hammered on by hundreds of people a day, so a machine that has been retired from one of those places often has far more life left in it than a cheap new one from a big box store. That changed how I thought about the whole thing.

I learned that a stair climber with a worn step chain is a repair bill waiting to happen. I learned to ask for the serial number and the hours on the console, the same way I would ask for the hours on a tractor.

The day the truck came

In the end we got a commercial rowing machine, a stair climber with new steps already fitted, a proper squat rack with plates, a rubber floor, and a treadmill that did not smell like toast. I found most of it while looking at used commercial gym equipment, and one evening I rang them with a long list of nervous questions.

It came on a flatbed on a Thursday. Six of us carried it in, which in hindsight was our first training session. The old treadmill went out to the scrap pile behind the hall, and I will admit I felt a strange pang watching it go, as though it had been waiting thirty years for someone to finally use it properly.

I kept the taped bench. It sits in the corner now. Nobody lifts on it, but people put their water bottles on it and their phones, and I like that it is still there.

What changed, and what did not

I want to be honest about this part, because it would be easy to make it sound like a film. We did not all turn into athletes.

But Kaylee comes almost every day after her shift at the feed store, and she has started a little whiteboard where people write their stair climber times in coloured marker. I come in before the evening milking twice a week and row for twenty minutes, and my resting heart rate, which I never knew until my doctor told me in the spring, has come down in a way that made the doctor raise her eyebrows.

Denny came back to drills in September. He does not do the stair advance yet. He runs the pump and calls out pressures and watches the rest of us climb with a look on his face I cannot quite describe, somewhere between pride and envy.

The phone calls I did not expect

Over the summer word got around. A department two townships over called and asked how we had done it, then another one in Wayne County. I tell them the same thing. Do a breakfast. Measure the room before you buy anything. Ask the welder on your crew what he knows, because there is always a welder and he always knows something. And look at used gym equipment for sale before you look at anything shiny, because the money goes much further and the machines are meant for heavy use.

The room now

Last week I found a note under the door of the station, written on the back of a feed store receipt in Kaylee's handwriting. It said that she had beaten my stair time by four seconds and that I should probably stop eating sausage. I pinned it to the whiteboard. Then I went home, ate one sausage out of pure stubbornness, and set my alarm half an hour earlier.