Two gyms. I pay for one.

I spent $0 eating out for twenty-one straight shifts in August.

I was at camp, and camp feeds you. There's a gym there too. Also free. I lifted in it eight times in that block.

For anyone new: I work a 28-day rotation at a camp in northern Alberta. Seven days on, seven off, seven nights on, seven off, every shift 12 hours. So 14 of every 28 days I live on site, plus a travel day at each end. On those days food and a gym cost me nothing.

August was a long one. I worked 21 shifts between the 5th and the 26th, 14 of them nights.

My company pays me an allowance for the inconvenience of staying in camp. They also provide free unlimited food. Those are two separate things. One doesn't pay for the other.

From August 5 to 25 I spent $0.00 at restaurants. Twenty-one shifts and I didn't buy a single meal.

I got off nights at 6:30 AM on August 26, drove home and went grocery shopping for the week.

That's $127.03 a day.

The grocery number is normal. I told you in August that a week of groceries at home runs me about $360. This one was $317.77.

The restaurant number is high. We went to a Bill Burr show in Calgary that weekend and stayed the night in a hotel. We went with my brother, my sister and her fiancé, and I paid for their dinner. My wife and I had breakfast out the next morning before we drove home.

So that's three weeks of eating at camp for nothing, then $889.18 in my first week home.

I'm home 12 days out of every 28, travel aside, and I still have to train on those days.

The camp gym is free. It's also no use to me when I'm home.

Last year I started building one at home. I started with a bench, adjustable dumbbells and a cheap treadmill. Then I added a dual cable tower that doubles as a squat rack.

This May, training for the Ironman, I needed room for a bike trainer and the bonus room wasn't big enough. I already had to fold the treadmill and put it in the hallway to use the weights.

So I bought a Murphy bed for the spare room and put the trainer and the treadmill in there. We rarely have people stay over, but we still want the option. That room is the pain cave, and its full receipt gets its own video.

All the home gym equipment, including the Tacx Flux 2 smart trainer and not including the bike, comes to $8,859.

The free gym didn't save me from buying one. I have two gyms and I paid for one of them.

A shift is 12 hours. Add half an hour a day on the bus between camp and site. Call it eight hours of sleep.

That's 20.5 hours. It leaves 3.5 hours to eat, shower, pack my lunch and call my wife.

Training takes two of them.

It doesn't fit, so I sleep less. On shift I get about five hours.

On days I ride or run around 3:30 AM and lift after shift at 6:30 PM. On nights I train from 2 to 4 PM before the bus.

One week in July I barely trained. Work was flattening me that week, so it isn't a clean test. My sleep averaged 5:46 a night against my usual 5:03. That's 43 minutes more, not two hours.

So the free gym costs me sleep. The free food costs me something too. I only get it at camp, and camp is half of every month away from home.

None of that shows up in Monarch.

I spent a long time treating the camp half as the good deal and the home half as the expensive one. Free food and a free gym, against groceries and a build.

That's backwards, or at least it's only half the ledger.

The camp half is free because I'm not there by choice. The home half costs money because that's where my life is, and the things you'd never give up are the things that charge you. I didn't buy a second gym because I'm bad with money. I bought it because the free one only exists on the days I'd rather be somewhere else.

I'm not a financial advisor. This is one guy reading his own bank statements out loud.

Most jobs run some version of this. They hand you something for free, then take the payment somewhere you don't have a category for.

Reply and tell me the one thing your job gives you for free — and what it actually costs you. I'll read every one.

— Kiegan