War Dog

Chapter 11

Up and out the door, the fatigue I'd felt yesterday significantly reduced to a mild tiredness that another nights sleep would fix. Dressed in workout clothes, hair in a neat bun fingerless gloves on and out the door before any of the rest of the hybrids even thought about being up. I made my way to the training room, the lights automatically turning on as I walk through the door. I eye off the climbing wall, always my favourite thing to train, but instead made my way over to the gym equipment. 

I eyed off the dumbbells and started mentally preparing the workout plan for today. I popped the earbuds in and pressed play on my workout play list, hopping on the treadmill. I started off at a sedate pace that would chafe at most hybrids, but most humans would have struggled with. As I pick up the pace on the treadmill, the doors open drawing my attention and before the person has even stepped through I can smell that it's Ghost. I look down at the time on my phone. 0430. Ghost stops to look at me, doing the same thing. Clearly neither of us were expecting anyone else in the gym. I gesture an arm inviting him in without a word, and without stopping what I'm doing on the treadmill. 

He makes his way to a treadmill next to me to warm up. We train in silence, each of us listening to our own music without any need for communication. Having a silent training companion is a pleasant change compared to all the hybrids that like to chat. I push the machine up to it's max speed setting and sprint. I maintain the pace for long enough that Ghost next to me has finished with his warm up, and is watching me appreciatively as he makes his way over to the weights. He looks at his watch every so often, and I realise he's timing me. Even though the machine is at it's speed limit, I'm not. No where near. So I kept going until I got bored, and felt well and truly warmed up, and shifted to all fours. I could run faster in this position, but I couldn't last as long due to shoulder fatigue, so I ran until my shoulders started to feel the familiar ache and burn that told me I had been out of training for too long and I was going to be in pain for a couple of days.

I stopped the treadmill, stepping off feeling hot, panting hard to cool off. The palms and soles of my feet sweating from the pads to help cool me off. I wiped my hands and feet on the small towel I'd bought with me. Moving over to the open training area, I sit and stretch out my muscles, working on my flexibility, careful with the joints highly likely to dislocate. I ran through a series of exercises specifically designed to strengthen ligaments and tendons and muscles surrounding my hips and shoulders. 

In between Ghosts sets, I could sense his keen interest on me as I continued running through the exercises, leg raises, clam lifts, controlled hip thrusts, single leg lifts. Finding weights to suit my needs I continued with Bulgarian Split deadlifts, dumbbell lunges and goblet squats. I continued pushing my body through the exercises I hated to do, feeling the ache and pains familiar to one who used to pushing their limits. Standing and panting still, I re-rack the weights I'd been using and move to cooling off. I look up to find Ghosts attention on me, having finished up his session with the barbell, and was watching me.

"You don't lift very heavy, do you?" His tone was curious as he watched me. 

"I don't need to lift heavy. I'm built for speed, not for lifting. My physical training is more geared to keeping my joints together so I don't dislocate something out on the field. I can lift heavy if I need to. People for example, my brother yesterday flying at me. But as a Dog of War, I train like a dog would, not a human. You want me fast, and as long as I can lift my body weight up, and take my equipment with me, that's the goal. I can drag your ass to safety too, if need be. Ultimately, my goal is to get to enemy soldiers throats before they can lift a finger to defend themselves. Considering you saw how fast my brother was yesterday, you should be aware of just how quickly I can attack and defend. I'll leave the heavy lifting to you, you leave the need for speed to me." I grin wryly at him.