One gym door closes, a Wareham gym door opens, for Coast Guard members enrolled in a training class based at the former Coast Guard Air Station.

A class of 17 Coast Guard traveled from bases from New York City to Jonesport, Maine, to undergo basic law enforcement training at the former Otis Air Force Base, but found themselves without a training facility this week, as the base's gym was undergoing renovations.

"We had to improvise with the renovations," explained Chief Petty Officer Jamie Simmons, who is in charge of the school.  "Fortunately, one of the members, Paul Rinta, was local.

Also fortunate was that Old Iron gym on Cranberry Highway had just been purchased by an Army veteran who was completely renovating the facility and introducing a new schedule of classes.

"It's an icon in Wareham," new owner and Wareham native Rob Faria said. "It was the place to be to come to work out, and I wanted to revitalize it."

The gym also seemed a natural fit for military training.

Some of the most popular classes are "boot camps" led by veterans who do the whole "Drill-Sergeant" thing.

"Yes, the whole class gets 'smoked' if one person is lagging," Faria said.

And Faria offers military discounts and free "get-ready-for-boot-camp" membership for military recruits.

"Military will always be welcome here," Faria said.

But the training is a little different than that which Faria received as part of a tank unit in the Army during the mid-1990s.

Faria said that his training was geared towards fighting the Soviets on the plains of Eastern Europe.

The Coast Guard members are practicing skills such as immobilizing a suspect, making an arrest, and applying handcuffs...all with special consideration of the often-tight, confined spaces of a boat.

Trainee Gwendolyn Sorensen is a fireman at the Coast Guard Communications Station in Boston who said that she and many of the trainees, hopes to eventually be assigned to a boarding team on a Coast Guard Boat, and then become a boarding team officer.

From Tuscon, Arizona, she enrolled in the Coast Guard to continue a family tradition and is the group's most recent boot-camp graduate, having just completed boot camp in July.

This is the farthest east she has been from Tuscon, and it's been quite a change.

"It's cold and it's rainy, but so far I'm enjoying it," she said.

She'll have to get used to it after she gets assigned to a boat.