Reminds me of a story:
A few years ago, the University of Toronto had a big student vote on whether or not to use raise an extra student few to build a very, very nice outdoor track and adjoining fitness facility, basically for student athletes and occasional intramural sports as far as I can tell. They call it the Ontario Center of Excellence of something like that.
A big part of selling this multi-million dollar purchase to a student body that doesn't run much and definitely doesn't care about running was convincing them that the track and the enclosed field would be available to them along with all the other facilities they get to use with their athletic center pass (pool, indoor track, weight rooms, etc).
Now that the thing is open, it really is quite beautiful. It's hosted some big meets (for Toronto) and I've seen Usain Bolt and Shaheen run there. I'd love to work out on it. Hours available for faculty, public member and "general" student use? 9:30-10:30am, Tues and Thurs. That's it. (Maybe this has changed, but that was the last time I looked it up. If someone from U of T athletics is reading this, please correct me.)
I work at U of T and tried to just walk in one morning at 7am when there was just a girls' lacrosse team doing drills (I normally run on the indoor track a few blocks away). Feeling a bit self-conscious, I just started to jog on the track. Holy moly. It might have been the first time those girls saw a 45 year-old man almost get physically subdued by two security guards. (I still don't know who called them, but they weren't impressed when I showed them my faculty/AC membership card.) I think I could have taken the little one.
This long story is all to say that you don't always have access to even the facilities you have paid for. You definitely don't have guaranteed access to the ones you haven't. But I do encouraging just jumping the fence.