Thanksgiving Day (or as it was known in our house, The Day When Some One Cries or Mommy Takes Pills Because You Ask Questions Day) is now upon us and you either have or soon will eat a meal certain to equal or surpass the annual nutritional intake of a good sized Bengali village.  I have not returned to my ancestral lands for today’s annual celebration of all things caloric but instead will be spending the day with partner and friends (everyone’s bringing a dish) as is my usual practice.  It was during a discussion of this ad hoc gathering that I came to realize that while the components of the traditional Thanksgiving meal are fairly standard— turkey, stuffing (or “dressing” if your dad wore a tie to work), sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and the obligatory vegetables— the composition of said components varies greatly and opinions regarding this composition occupy a space in the holder’s heart somewhere between religious belief and the love of a first born child.

While strong opinion abounds concerning almost every aspect of our annual feed, the greatest controversies swarm not around the preparation of turkey (be it roasted, brined or even deep fried) but in the stuffing and sweet potato arenas.  Crime statistics indicate that domestic disturbance calls almost double over the holidays and while exact numbers are hard to come by many experts attribute up to a third of this increase to” stuffing disputes.”  In the interest of full disclosure I am a stuffing purest.  Stuffing for me is a simple dish of dried bread cubes, a few herbs, maybe an onion and some chicken stock.  The preceding items are mixed in appropriate proportions, put into an oven-safe pan and baked so that the top gets all warm and crunchy.  That’s it.  Now I know that many Americans have a deep love for Grammy’s sausage and sage stuffing, which they associate with feelings of warmth, security and familial love.  This is simply wrong.  I also know that some people even go so far as to prepare stuffing with chestnuts or in some extreme cases oysters.  This is also simply not right and in the case of oysters, dis-gust-ing.

Sweet potatoes are also a highly contentious area beginning with what to even call them.  To all those in the yam camp (you know who you are) unless you live in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean or come from one of the many diverse and vibrant cultures associated with those places, you have in all probability never eaten a yam, so stop calling them yams and start calling them sweet potatoes so that those of us who have always called them sweet potatoes can stop hating you and eat. Sweet potatoes again are a very simple dish but one easily destroyed by those wild-eyed tuber terrorists who insist upon beating, whipping , mashing and marshmallowing something that should be peeled, cutting in quarters, covered in butter and brown sugar and baked until mushy, sweet and delicious.   I don’t care what you mother did, your grandmother did or what recipe your culinary prophet received on golden tablets from a sweet potato angel.

While I know I’ve just opened a big ol can ‘o worms and surely ruined Thanksgiving for everybody, I’m also pretty sure I won’t be getting any invitations for Thanksgiving dinner next year either.

And to those who in the sprit of the holidays ask,

Can’t we all just get along?

No we can’t.

Happy Thanksgiving

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

Some may find it strange that this week’s post is on music and fitness, since I was probably the last one to subscribe to the iPod revolution.  Resisting as long as I could, I’d contend that I preferred to listen to the sounds of nature as I ran: the pounding waves of Lake Michigan, the robins and the squirrels, my fellow runners’ occasional grunts of greeting and even more occasional “Good mornings.”  From my superior height I looked down on those who perceived everything through little wires attached to their ears, essentially missing out on 90% of the benefit of exercising outside.  When my husband gave me an iPod as a gift one year, I took him to task for “not knowing me” well enough to realize that I didn’t want to come within a barge-pole’s length of one of those evil little things. (I know, I know— poor guy).

Well, all this has changed now that I’m pregnant with my second child.  Unlike the first time, when I basically wouldn’t have known I was expecting for the first 5 months because everything was so easy and I was happily doing 12-mile runs until a few weeks before delivery, these days it’s difficult even to get my head up off the pillow, let alone drag my bulky, queasy self out the door in 20-degree Chicago weather.  Ladies who have experienced morning sickness, you know whereof I speak.

Clearly emergency measures were called for.  I dug out and dusted off my maligned iPod, downloaded everything available, and guilted myself outside.  And you know what?  It worked.  Of course, it was no miracle cure, but the music got me out there and kept me from losing my breakfast, and I came back from the run feeling a little bit lighter and slightly more prepared to face the day.

Now that I’m just about over the torturous first trimester hump, I have to admit that I am hooked.  Even when I don’t need it, I will bring the iPod on my runs from time to time, listening indiscriminately to whatever’s on there:  Prince, Bjork, Terrance Simien, Zeppelin, podcasts of Harry Shearer’s Le Show, even Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou belting out the songs from Sweeney Todd— you name it, I’ll use it.  You take your inspiration when you need it, I guess, and however you can get it.  To paraphrase the immortal words of the rotund Sam Johnson (who clearly never, ever did a crunch or lifted a single weight),

Life [exercise?] is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

Jeanine Casler lives, writes, and runs in Evanston, Illinois.   She would love to hear about what YOU have on your iPod.

Last week, I strapped my bike to the top of the car, packed a bag of riding clothes, and drove to work.  Most of my colleagues have grown used to my odd fascination with the two wheeled machine, but that day, they offered comments, usually with an eye canted toward the sky.  The temperature was forecast to tip the lower forties, and the weathermen were giddy with the possibility of flurries.

You going out?” one co-worker asked.

I nodded.

Lunch time ride,” I said.

She looked dubious, but said nothing more.

I made it to the trails before noon, anxious to squeeze in a forty-five minute trek.

The wind blew across the lake, dropping the temperature even more as I zoomed down the hill, squeezed through the fence gate, and pedaled the singletrack to the main trail.  Brown leaves, already past their glorious Technicolor offerings, buried most of the paths.  At one turn, my tires slid out from underneath me, and I only caught myself with a quick dab— a foot dropped down to maintain balance.

Most of the ride felt the same.  Familiar obstacles stopped me, whether I was riding a line through a rock garden (didn’t make it), balancing along the skinny bridges (completed one out of five attempts), or launching my bike and body over the mongo log (the crash wasn’t too bad, thank you for asking).

Thirty minutes into the ride, though, as I was laughing at my inability to ride anything without falling over or coming to a dead, unexpected stop, the first flake drifted down.  Moments later, others lazily followed.

I stopped in the middle of the trail, watching the ephemeral flurries flickering past the browned leaves and bare branches, spiraling down into the little ravine where I was standing.  I had entered a Japanese print painted in sepia and white.

That moment reminded me of other vignettes, other places that my feet have taken me: sunlight glittering through ice-encased branches on the top of Old Rag Mountain, wild ponies snuffling around my campsite in Sand Bridge on a bike camping trip, summer sunlight warming the rocks at a state park in West Virginia, my daughters’ small hands clasping mine.

The flurries slowed, then stopped.  I rode a little more carefully, made it back to the car, and drove to work, arriving one minute before the lunch break ended.

Good ride?” the co-worker asked.

Beautiful,” I replied.

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

You can learn more about our assessment and lifestyle coaching by clicking here.

For your complimentary assessment and lifestyle coaching session contact me at 212-FURTHER (387-8437) or jamie@furtherfitness.com.

Jamie Dreyer is the President of Further Fitness NYC.

I was talking with some colleagues about the present fight over same-sex marriage, when someone in the group commented,

I think it’s silly.  All this fighting over a word.

Now I have every reason to believe that this individual believes in civil rights— for women, for lesbians and gays, for transgender people, for people of color.  And yet she thought both sides of the debate were silly for fighting over the word marriage.  I found her naïveté troubling in no small part because her chosen profession was the study and teaching of literature and language.

My colleagues’ infelicitous remark rests on the fallacy that marriage is merely a word, an arbitrary symbol that just happens to refer to the union between a man and woman.  Such thinking leads many seemingly well-intentioned people to wrongly suppose that civil union is just as good as marriage— as if one could easily substitute one term for another.  But when it comes to marriage, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet.

The word marriage does not merely name or represent a social contract; it enacts that contract, shaping how we live and how we think, how we organize our households and how we pay our taxes.  It constructs and maintains a whole host of social, economic, and political conditions and institutions, and grants a whole host of civil rights— from the most public to the most personal.  Marriage doesn’t describe a reality; it creates one.

The same is true of civil unions; the only problem is, civil unions construct a set of “separate but equal” institutions and conditions, a shadow world that parallels marriage but never attains the full protection, security, and equality that marriage grants.  History has taught us the discrimination inherent in separate but equal.  And it is no coincidence that the same rhetoric used against the emancipation of slaves in the 1850s and interracial marriage in 1960s (the rhetoric of states’ rights and Biblical verse) is now being used against same-sex marriage today.  For all the important and real differences between oppression based on race and that based on sexual orientation, the rhetoric of bigotry has a frightening continuity.

But if rhetoric oppresses, it also frees.  In a recent post on Male Pattern Fitness, our favorite fitness crush Andrew Heffernan speaks eloquently about his rhetorical relations:

Rhetoric has become a nasty word of late, but my Dad’s car had a bumper sticker on it that said “Support Your Local Rhetorician!” when I was growing up.  I’m a Shakespeare junkie.  My mother’s a published author several times over.   My sister writes for the bloody New York Times Magazine, for Pete’s sake.  I’m all about rhetoric.

Heffernan understands the power of words, especially when it comes to exercise and nutrition.  Ever notice that fitness magazines recycle the same information issue after issue.  That is because, according to Heffernan,

Exercise is exercise, folks, and good eating is good eating.  Boy howdy, we love to parse the details, but it’s actually a fairly simple formula, and you’re either implementing that formula or you’re not.  What gets us going— what starts a fad, a trend, a craze, a revolution— is context.  The messenger.  The rhetoric.

Remember the political pundits who dismissed Obama’s eloquence as empty rhetoric?  Heffernan reminds us that rhetoric is never empty.  The words we use shape the world around us.  Obama’s historic election is testament to that.

And just as words shape our world, so they shape our bodies.  In Heffernan’s words, “what good coaches (and good fitness writers and DVD makers and cobblers and wheelwrights) offer us is not more facts but more strategies.  More ways to make the simple and widely-known facts work for us.”

More than dumbbells and Swiss balls, words are our best exercise equipment.  Whether we are a nature-boy Training Barefoot or “a pudgy unicorn ambling east on Santa Monica Blvd. near La Brea,” whether we are sharing  More Marvelous Mantras or “curses uttered in the dying moments of a race,” we at Blog Further have sought to exercise rhetoric, to add to the number of rhetorical apparatuses and strategies for thinking about health and fitness.  With each post, we hope to redefine, to reframe our relation to exercise, a project of accretion in our attempt to include new experiences, new abilities, new strategies.   Thank you for taking part in that redefinition!

Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further.  He urges his readers to support marriage equality.