And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.

—-Tears for Fears, “Mad World”

Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, my friend Jamie and I plan on carving pumpkins, cooking dinner, and watching that cult-classic Donnie Darko.  For those of you unfamiliar with the film, Donnie Darko— in addition to being a brilliant period piece set in Northern Virginia of the late 80s (the sequence set to Tear for Fears’ “Head over Heels” can’t be praised enough)— tells the story of an adolescent boy coming to grips with his own untimely death.

I mention the movie because I have been thinking alot about the relation between death, dying and fitness.  My sense is that most popular publications on health and fitness steer clear of any discussion about illness and dying, as if death and disease constituted fitness’ other.  The cover model’s lean, fit body, advertised as disease-free, sanitized, antiseptic seems haunted by another body– one unseen because unacceptable– one that is diseased, dirty, and fecund.   My unease with this dualism between the fit body and the ill one probably stems from the accidents of my own life.  At fifteen, I watched my brother-in-law, a fit man of 20, lay dying on the living room couch after his back cancer returned and metastasized.  When I reached twenty myself, I came out into a gay community both decimated and galvanized by AIDS.  (An interesting exercise: read Donnie Darko as a queer commentary on youth and AIDS).  And as I now approach middle age, I find myself all the more familiar with the strange vicissitudes of chronic and life-threatening ailments, both in myself and in my family and friends.

So, “I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad” that popular discussions around fitness in America, while choke-full of information on how to live healthy, has very little to say about how to die healthy.  After all, dying is one of fittest things a body can do.  To pit one’s fitness routine against mortality seems a mere exercise in madness, desperately projecting one’s anxieties around potency, illness and death onto other bodies deemed “unhealthy” and “unfit.”  What I love about Donnie Darko, besides its willingness to take serious the rage, vulnerability, and lucidity of queer youths in particular, and young adults in general, is its implicit message that there are healthy ways to die.  (Another text to read alongside Donnie Darko in this regard is Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.)

So, in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, I invite readers this week to share their thoughts on how to bring death, dying and illness into more interesting, non-dualistic relations with health and fitness.  What books, articles, films, music, video and websites have you found particularly helpful to think with?  What delicious treats have you collected in your bag of tricks?

Happy Halloween Everyone!

Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further.

Channel surfing the other night I came across something that I hadn’t seen for quite awhile.  No, not Mexican midget wrestling; you can catch that on LA cable access Fridays at 2AM.  I saw a Bowflex ad and I was a little shocked.  This ad was well … I don’t quite know how to say this…straight.  This made me more than a little nostalgic for those good ol’ man-on-man softcore commercials from the 80’s and 90’s.  Now those of you old enough to remember “Frankie Say…” t-shirts surely also remember these spots.  The young fair-haired man-child clad only in a headband, red gym shorts, tennis shoes and baby oil goes through a series of muscle flexing exercises while an announcer extols the virtues of the machine in his best Barry White basso.  Then after nearly ten minutes of slow pans across taut, glistening man flesh, some sweaty girl enters holding a towel to frighten all the gay away.  I’m sure that for 10 or 12 people this ad was an informative pitch for an expensive piece of exercise equipment.  For the rest of us it was in fact gay porn.  And for a kid growing up in southeastern Virginia the closest he would get to the real thing until he got out of town.

Having made it out of town the Bowflex boy faded from my memory.  That was until 7 or so years ago when the company ran a new infomercial.  We again had a shirtless young man (much more muscular than his predecessor) demonstrating the new and improved machine but this time instead of the ultra masculine voice-over we had a hunky authority figure explaining the benefits of resistance training.  Now I’m sure that the folks at Bowflex and their advertising agency intended these men to be seen as doctor/patient, coach/athlete, or trainer/client, which is no doubt how some people saw it.  Yours truly, and many other slightly pervy people, knew that this wasn’t as much coach/athlete as it was daddy/boy.  Space doesn’t allow a full explanation of this dynamic so to those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about…ask your gay friends.

The new ads currently airing caught me off guard not in spite of all the previous homoeroticism but because of it.  This was not your gay uncle’s Bowflex infomercial.  This was straight people— straight, fat, white people to be exact.  Instead of eye-catching beautiful people of either sex, you have Mr. and Mrs. Strip Center talk about how much weight they’ve lost as a result of thrice weekly workouts.  But they saved the best (or worst) for last: a fat piggy man who is now a thin douche bag looks into the camera and says,

My fat clothes?  I give them to my fat friends.

It is an amazing transformation, a physical transformation anyway.  I just can’t figure out how he got such a large piece of apparatus into his trailer home.

Now I’m sure that this new tact on behalf of Bowflex sells a great deal more exercise equipment and that, in the cyber age, boy-loving-boys in the hinterlands aren’t looking to infomercials for daydream fodder, but the sentimental part of me misses the good old days when the guys in weight loss commercials were people who already worked out 5 days a week, hadn’t eaten a carbohydrate since they were 12 and knew that a layer of baby oil expertly applied was all that stood between a 15 year old boy and ecstasy.

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

When I was expecting my son Luca (he’s now almost 4) I was determined to keep running throughout the pregnancy.  Although my midwife was strangely unenthusiastic, everything I’d read told me that it would be safe and even beneficial to keep running as long as I could (for me, this was up to 8 months, when I decided my “running” had degraded into ambling, then waddling, then barely moving, and it was time to call a halt).  Women who run during pregnancy in general have easier pregnancies, and shorter labors— always a plus— which often require less medical intervention.  In addition, running has always served as a stress-reliever for me, so if my hormone-addled self had been forced to quit for nine months, my husband would have been living in constant fear of bodily harm.

Of course, you can’t overdo it.  But “overdoing it” means different things to different people; the old warnings about not exercising ‘til your heart rate gets up to 140 BPM have been disproved, although some doctors still base their advice on such obsolete parameters.  General rule of thumb is to listen to your body, don’t get overheated, and cut back on— if you don’t totally eliminate— the speed work.  If you are even slightly competitive, this is probably not a good time to run a race, as I can tell you from experience.  During my first trimester I had the brilliant idea of running a half marathon and thinking it would be easy to hold back . . . it wasn’t.  When that gun goes off you have to fight against the usual Pavlovian response, and that struggle continued for me throughout the 13.1 miles.  “Never again!” I told myself, as I cursed having to hang out in the back of the pack with the folks who were wearing beer can hats and chatting on their cell phones all the way to the finish line.  Once I relinquished the need for speed, though, my running became more enjoyable than ever.  As I got bigger, my pace got slower, and soon I experienced the liberation of tossing out the watch and instead paying attention to the world around me.

In the end, the contentment produced by running will be worth all the disapproving comments and horrified stares.  I received countless suggestions from strangers that I switch to walking so the baby wouldn’t get “jiggled around,” and was often asked by family and friends about the safety of running while pregnant, e.g.:

Couldn’t your uterus fall out?

On such occasions, just refer them to Chris Lundgren’s Runner’s World Guide to Running and Pregnancy (Rodale, 2003), which, in addition to being a great source of information for you, can also keep you sane during a period of life not notable for its sanity.

Jeanine Casler lives, runs, and writes in Evanston, Illinois.

My neighbor Jim and I slipped our kayaks into the lake, our paddles dipping into the glassy water.  We nudged through the fallen leaves dotting the surface, a scattering of orange and red stars.  The sky, with its mid-fall overcast, reflected mother-of-pearl in the ripples around us.

We moved down stream, around the point, and through several dying pine trees.  During the previous year’s drought, they sprang up on the low-lying spit of sand.  With the rise of the water level, though, they stood off the land like three doomed miniature lighthouses.

Paddling across the lake, we reached the far shore and then turned upstream.  A year prior, when we paddled this same spot, we had to move through a rock garden— large lumpy shoulders that rose above the surface, our plastic boats leaving little blue or red slivers of themselves on the grainy stone.  Now, we floated several feet above the garden, the rocks occasionally rubbing the undersides of our kayaks.

Further upstream, we floated over other areas that I remembered, now washed out by the higher water: the sand bar that spread out like blonde hair, the two boulders that pinched the stream into a setting from The Wind in the Willows, the large outcropping that served as a sheer-faced perch.

The river chattered to itself and us as we paddled further upstream. When the water became too shallow, we left the boats stranded on boulders and waded to the far bank.  Following a trail, we skirted a debris line.  High water the previous month had pushed over the banks, drawing a ragged scrawl of wood and cans and the occasional basketball, some refugee from a backyard that was too close to the water.

We hopped back into the river, stopping to watch a side stream bully its way through a series of pour-overs, ending in three tiny boiling holes, one of which slowly ate at a large boulder in the way.  We set out again, wading up to our chests before emerging on the other side, water sluicing from our wetsuits.

We moved from island to island, working our way over rocks, through pricker bushes, across small rivulets, finally turning back toward our boats perched in the stream.

Wedging myself into my kayak, snapping the spray skirt around the cockpit’s lip, I slipped into the water once again, my boat bobbing like an autumn leaf.  The current pushed me downstream, over and past the rocks, into the deeper section.

With no fanfare, we paddled back to the take out, hauled our boats up the muddy bank, tied them to the truck’s roof.

Some of the best memories are built of small, insignificant details.

Robin Follet lives, teaches, and cartoons in North Carolina.

My New Year’s resolution for 2008 was to do more high adventure activities.  I figured the best way to fit them into my work schedule was to make them my work schedule.  So in June, Adventure Further was born, and I traveled cross-country to Las Vegas with five clients.  Our first excursion was white water rafting down the Colorado River.  It was a simple day trip, no gear to bring and lunch was provided. We did not even have to row the boat seeing as it had an outboard.  And although I was picking them up at 3:30a.m. and they only went to bed at 2 a.m., everyone seemed to be in good spirits.

We loaded up the car and headed to the strip where we met our van and driver.  I forget if his name was Dean or Rick or Richard.  We’ll just call him Dick.  We were not even ten minutes into the drive before I realized that this guy was angry at the world and we had just entered his.  In Dick’s world the temperature must remain sub-zero so that he can wear his favorite motocross parka, jeans and a hat.  Too bad none of us got the memo that the desert would be transformed into the Arctic Circle, ’cause we were all wearing shorts and t-shirts.  It’s June in Nevada, Dick.  What the hell man!  Fortunately, the A/C blast only affected the people in the front two seats, where Brian and I were wearing our sleeveless tees.

In addition, Dick desperately wanted to play tour guide.  He would not shut up and grew visibly angry when not paid enough attention.

Dude, it’s 4 a.m.!  We all saw National Lampoon’s Vacation; you don’t have to impress us with your extensive knowledge of the Hoover Dam.

Luckily for Dick, Brian and I were wide awake and found it easier to offer the occasional “uh-ha” and “you don’t say” than to do deal with his passive-aggressive tantrums.

We finally arrived at the launch site and everybody wiped their eye boogers away, everyone except Brian and I, that is.  We never caught a wink of sleep due to the forced narrative by our navigator and the icy chill of the permafrost.  Instead we each plummeted out of the door onto the asphalt waiting for the scorching sun to do its job.  Once defrosted, we loaded into the raft and pushed off.

Holy crap, that water was cold!  No seriously, it was ice cold.  And when you added the wind, we were all shivering for over an hour.  As I looked around the raft at the blue faces, I saw the look in the group’s eyes.  It was a mutiny. They wanted to throw me overboard! Somehow I had made a terrible mistake by not informing everyone of the water temperature and in doing so became the least popular person on earth.  But how was I to know?  Who would have thought that the water temperature would be in the 50’s?  It was 115 degrees outside that day!  And when I asked the woman who took my reservation what we should wear, she said “Oh, just clothes to get wet in.”  Thanks for the heads up.

I will say, though, that the process of getting soaked was a ton of fun as you can see in the video below.  And I loved exploring the Grand Canyon.  I hope to go back someday and do a multiple day trip, spending the nights camped on the river bank and using oars instead of an outboard.

I learned several lessons on that first adventure.  First, ask every question imaginable beforehand.  Second, even if I have all my i’s dotted and t’s crossed, surprises still occur.  Third, sometimes people are just going to complain.  And lastly, never hire a driver named Dick.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.