HEALTH & FITNESS COLUMN

‘Healthonism:’ Work 

hard, play hard

L

ast August, on the 
last weekend of my 
summer internship, 

I entered a four-mile race in 
Bethlehem, PA. Though the 
town was 
typically 
quiet that 
summer, 
empty of 
neigh-
boring 
Lehigh 
Uni-
versity 
students, 
this par-
ticular weekend marked the 
grand opening of Musikfest: a 
10-day extravaganza of bands, 
beer and every form of fried 
food you can imagine, attended 
by more than a million people 
each year. Luckily, not every 
visitor entered the race that 
morning, and I was able to snag 
the first place prize: two tick-
ets to a concert of my choice 
(the options were O.A.R., 
Snoop Dogg and 3 Doors 
Down; I chose O.A.R.) and a 
refillable beer mug the size of a 
small child.

I was thrilled. Sticking my 

swag behind a tree, I ran a 
few cool-down miles to shake 
out my stiffening muscles, but 
I could hear music swelling 
over the distant festival tents 
and gurgles of beer from a 
tap, willing me to join the fun. 
Later, regrouped at last with 
my summer roommates, I 
posed for a picture in my race 
bib, a banana in one hand and 
a complimentary can of Coors 
Light in the other. My caption 
on Instagram read, “Post-race 
carbo load at its finest.”

It’s no secret that working 

out hard tends to warrant 
celebration. My race was 
just one among thousands 
of running events that offer 
drinks at the finish line — and 
I’m not just talking Gatorade. 
Disney’s Wine-and-Dine Half 
Marathon ends at the Epcot 
International Food and Wine 
Festival; a new 10K race in 
the U.K. offers wine instead 
of water at rest stops, with 
full bottles available for 
purchase at the finish. And 
then there’s the Marathon du 
Médoc in French wine country, 
the mackdaddy of party 
races, in which participants 
are encouraged to drink 23 
different glasses of wine and 
sample cheese, oysters, foie 
gras and ice cream — all while 
somehow finishing 26.2 miles.

Marathon du Médoc’s goal? 

To make a running event 
that combines “wine, sports, 
fun and health.” And if trend 

predictions are accurate, this 
unlikely combination of health 
and indulgence may soon be 
more common than you think. 

“Healthonism,” a term 

coined by J. Walter Thompson 
Intelligence, was featured in 
December on The Future 100, 
a list of top trends to watch for 
in 2016. Fox News describes 
the healthonism trend as such: 
“health-conscious millennials 
are offsetting consumption of 
alcohol with antioxidants and 
healthy mixers — mashing up 
exercise with hedonism, and 
flocking to a growing number 
of exercise-meets-drinking 
events.”

Hedonism, a lifestyle most 

associated with the wealthy 
men of leisure in 17th century 
England (think Oscar Wilde’s 
“Picture of Dorian Gray”), 
isn’t as antiquated as it sounds: 
hedonists simply pursue a life 
of pleasure and experiences, 
rather than obeying structured 
rules of society. So a modern 
hedonist may be a high school 
student who chooses to travel 
indefinitely instead of going 
to college, or a celebrity who 
spends a fortune on plastic 
surgery but donates nothing 
to charity. “Healthonism” is 
similar in that healthonists 
also seek out the good life — 
refusing to miss out on a party 
or pass up a drink — but they 
do so in a health-conscious 
way. Healthonists don’t just 
party; they get crunk after 
completing a marathon, a 
group bike ride or a Bikram 
yoga session. Similarly, 
healthonists don’t just drink; 
they imbibe on cocktails with 
cold-pressed organic juices, 
like Hotamelon Tequila 
Cleanse and RaspberryAddict 
Vodka Cleanse from the brand 
CleanDrinking.

Healthonists eat well, work 

out hard and play even harder. 
Basically, good health is their 
utmost priority — until they’re 
undermining it.

Mixing alcohol and an active 

lifestyle, or really any healthy 
lifestyle, has been an obvious 
no-no for years. Though 
there are reported benefits 
of drinking moderately — 
the Mediterranean Diet, 

recommended for Americans 
by the 2016 Dietary Guidelines, 
includes a daily glass of wine 
— most doctors and exercise 
scientists agree that if you 
must drink, one to two glasses 
is the maximum you should 
have. Going past this limit, 
especially for active people, 
can wreak havoc on your 
health. Alcohol lowers your 
blood sugar, making you crave 
sweet and fatty foods; disrupts 
sleep patterns, impeding 
recovery; and it packs on 
pounds, as boozy calories have 
zero nutritional value.

Despite these negative 

consequences, athletes still 
drink. And they drink even 
more on days when they 
exercise the most, according 
to a recent article in CNN. 
Scientists have speculated a 
few reasons why particularly 
strenuous workouts (or races) 
inspire people to drink: there’s 
the “celebration factor,” when 
teams to want celebrate after 
a big win or runners regroup 
at a bar for post-long run 
beers; there’s also the guilt 
factor, perhaps more common, 
when athletes plan an intense 
workout before a big night out 
with friends.

Case in point: New Year’s 

Eve at the gym. I was there 
with the rest of my hometown 
this past December, getting my 
weight lifting in before the big 
night, when our family friend 
shouted up to me from his 
elliptical: “Gotta burn off all 
those beer calories!”

I’d like to say that I don’t do 

this, that I’m not a healthonist. 
Yet I find myself planning my 
longest run of the week the 
morning before going out that 
night; and if you asked whether 
I stick to lean chicken, veggies 
and water as a post-race 
recovery meal, I’d probably 
laugh. (For the record, my 
go-tos are ice cream and wine.)

Am I hurting my health 

by celebrating occasionally? 
Maybe a little. But you can bet 
that if I didn’t have a concert 
ticket and beer mug calling my 
name in the Musikfest race this 
summer, I wouldn’t have ran as 
hard or as fast as I did. A little 
motivation never hurt anybody, 
as long as the celebration is 
kept in moderation. Let’s raise 
a cold-pressed juice cocktail 
to that.

Middlebrook is enjoying a fine 

wine and cheese platter after her 

daily five mile run. To ask how 

you too can enjoy this lifestyle, 

e-mail hailharp@umich.edu.

HAILEY 

MIDDLEBROOK

It’s no secret 
working out 
hard warrants 

celebration.

Successful superhero 
portrayal on The CW

By BEN ROSENSTOCK

Senior Arts Editor

The latest spinoff of The CW’s 

lucrative superhero franchise, 
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” 
has a lot of 
problems 
to 

overcome 
in 

its 
two-part 

premiere, 
and it doesn’t 
make 
it 

through with-
out stumbling. 
Still, by the 
end of its sec-
ond hour, the 
show 
estab-

lishes itself as 
potentially 
a 

very promising addition to the 
superhero genre.

“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” 

brings together minor char-
acters from “Arrow” and “The 
Flash” to form an Avengers-like 
team of heroes. The leader is Rip 
Hunter (Arthur Darvill, “Doc-
tor Who”), a time traveler who 
assembles the team, like Nick 
Fury from the Avengers mixed 
with the Doctor from “Doctor 
Who.” Rip picks Ray “The Atom” 
Palmer (Brandon Routh, “Super-
man 
Returns”), 
resurrected 

assassin Sara “White Canary” 
Lance (Caity Lotz, “Mad Men”), 
supervillains 
Leonard 
“Cap-

tain Cold” Snart and Mick 
“Heat Wave” Rory (Wentworth 
Miller and Dominic Purcell 
from “Prison Break”), nuclear 
physicist Martin Stein (Vic-
tor Garber, “Argo”) and former 
high school athlete Jefferson 
Jackson (Franz Drameh, “Edge 
of Tomorrow”), the last two of 
whom fuse together to form the 
Human Torch-esque Firestorm. 
There’s also Kendra “Hawk-
girl” Saunders (Ciara Renée, 
“Big Fish” the musical) and 
Carter “Hawkman” Hall (Falk 
Hentschel, “StreetDance 2”), a 
reincarnated ancient Egyptian 

princess and prince. Rip explains 
to the team that they must travel 
through time to find and defeat 
the immortal Vandal Savage 
(Casper Crump, “Helium”), pre-
venting the fall of civilization 100 
years into the future.

That’s a lot of exposition to 

dole out over the course of a pilot, 
especially with 10 major char-
acters, and “Legends” doesn’t 
quite manage to do it without 
feeling clunky. There are a lot of 
requisite expositional lines with 
characters blatantly stating their 
identities as if introducing them-
selves to the camera.

The show also makes some 

unwise moves in characteriza-
tion. Snart’s cartoony anti-hero 
persona (aided by Miller’s hilari-
ous line readings) and Sara’s sim-
ple desire to have fun in whatever 
time period she’s in make them 
early standouts, but other char-
acters don’t leave as much of an 
impression. Despite the show’s 
insistence that Vandal Savage 
is a terrifying threat, Crump 
doesn’t have the dark charisma 
or coldblooded stare that made 
Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, 
“Spartacus”) and Damien Darhk 
(Neal 
McDonough, 
“Desper-

ate Housewives”) such compel-
ling villains in “Arrow.” Worse, 
Kendra and Carter immediately 
drain life from every scene they 
enter, a problem when a big part 
of the plot depends on their age-
old battle with Savage. And while 
Garber is great as Martin Stein, 
Stein gives a bad first impression 
when he drugs and kidnaps Jack-
son to force him to join the team 
on their first time-traveling mis-
sion.

Plots based around time trav-

eling can be irresistible when 
they’re mapped out logically, but 
sometimes the plot of “Legends” 
requires you to ignore glaring 
inconsistencies. 
For 
example, 

after Savage gets a hold of future 
tech and as a result catastrophe 
happens in 2016, Rip insists that 

this is only a projection of the 
future; time is like cement, and 
it won’t be set in stone until Sav-
age, in the 1975 timeline, manages 
to reverse-engineer the future 
tech. By itself this logic makes a 
sort of “squint and it kind of fol-
lows” sense, but it doesn’t match 
up with the show’s established 
premise. The team’s whole jour-
ney is predicated on the fact that 
time isn’t like cement; it’s more 
like water, malleable and not 
gradually hardening.

These problems seem sig-

nificant enough to derail a typi-
cal time travel series, but it’s 
remarkable how much you can 
overlook if something is really 
fun, and “Legends of Tomor-
row” is certainly fun. It might 
make no sense to have Mar-
tin Stein meet his younger self 
in 1975 and for the timeline to 
remain completely unchanged, 
but damn is it fun to watch. In 
terms of entertainment, a team 
of snarky superheroes traveling 
through time is a recipe for suc-
cess.

The second episode is also a 

vast improvement over the first, 
with far less clumsy exposition 
to deliver. It also smartly varies 
the character dynamics, sending 
Ray, Snart and Mick out to steal 
something while Stein hangs 
out with Sara, Jefferson and 
his younger self. Unfortunately, 
Kendra and Carter are still rel-
egated to their own boring sub-
plot, though the conclusion of 
the episode hints that Carter’s 
role will be smaller in upcoming 
episodes.

“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” 

may stumble a bit in its two-part 
pilot, but when it comes down to 
it, both episodes are entertaining 
throughout, and when you have a 
couple boring characters in a cast 
of 10, the problems aren’t glaring. 
If the series continues to focus on 
the moments of giddy time travel 
fun, it’ll be a more than worthy 
addition to the CW Arrowverse.

EVENT PREVIEW

B

DC’s 
Legends of 
Tomorrow

Series Pre-
miere

Thursdays 

at 8 p.m.

The CW

TV REVIEW

THE CW

Looking at your nudes like. 

Come ‘Closer’

By MARIA ROBINS

Daily Arts Writer

“Love bores you,” one charac-

ter accuses another. “No, it disap-
points me,” the other responds. 
Patrick Marber’s 
“Closer” 
skips 

syrupy-sweet 
implications 
to 

engage with the 
underbelly 
of 

romance. 
The 

close-up look at 
intimacy 
gone 

wrong is more 
relatable 
than 

we’d often like to 
admit.

School 
of 

Music, Theatre 
& Dance senior 
David 
Barnes 

makes his direc-
torial debut with “Closer,” and in it 
he allows the audience to come face 
to face with shame, deceit and the 
disappointment of falling in and 
out of love through vignettes that 
peek into the lives of four individu-
als. First performed in London in 
1997, “Closer” centers on the inter-
twined love lives of two men and 
two women in a way that is hardly 
romantic. It is peppered with deci-

sions that show desperation and 
questionable moral character in the 
pursuit of meaningful intimacy.

The production, backed by stu-

dent organization Basement Arts, 
focuses on a minimal design while 
tackling complex and sophisticated 
emotional content. The cast con-
sists of four actors, and the set is 
little more than a table and couple 
chairs.

“What’s nice about this play is 

that it kind of skips all of the lovey-
dovey every day romantic life and 
just goes from ultimate romance to 
catastrophic disaster, which is real-
ly exciting for the actors because 
you’re not doing anything but highs 
and lows the whole time,” Barnes 
said.

The show is honest and unfil-

tered in a way that was controver-
sial at its outset. Barnes said theater 
was a fitting medium for its darker 
storylines.

“I think it’s a very relatable show. 

I think a lot of theater accents the 
reality of humanity and kind of digs 
into the dark sides of people, but 
this show kind of takes it to another 
level, which is why when it came 
out in ’97 it was so shocking,” he 
said. “It’s certainly less shocking 
now, but it explores people doing 
shitty things, doing things they 

shouldn’t do, doing things that we 
— as society — frown upon, which 
is so interesting because we all do 
stuff like that. We just kind of shove 
it under the rug.” 

Although, as audience members, 

it is challenging to parse where our 
sympathies ought to lie, Barnes 
suggests that the intention of the 
play is not to feel sorry for the char-
acters, but rather understand their 
motives and rationale for behavior 
that has harmful consequences.

“Everyone 
cheats; 
everyone 

lies; everyone is kind of horrible 
to each other, but with good rea-
son,” Barnes said. “I don’t need the 
audience to like these characters. 
I just need them to understand 
them, because all of the things 
we’re doing are things we’ve done 
or we would do if we were in the 
situation, we just tell ourselves we 
wouldn’t.”

“Closer” lives up to its title in 

the decision to present on a “thrust 
stage,” which essentially means 
that there is no backstage and the 
stage is surrounded by the audience 
on three sides.

“Doing it in the thrust is really 

exciting because it kind of literally 
thrusts the actors into the audience 
... the show is very aware that it’s 
theater,” Barnes said.

Because the style and form of the 

play is so intimate and bare-boned, 
the scenes require comprehensive 
and meticulous text work, some-
thing that a small cast generously 
lends itself to.

“With a small cast I can spend 

an hour with two people working 
on 15 lines and really dig into it and 
really figure out what’s working, 
what’s not, why they do every-
thing,” Barnes said.

I saw him do exactly this during a 

rehearsal in which two characters, 
Anna and Dan, discuss the muddy 
terms of their relationship in a res-
taurant. During the scene, Barnes 
urged the actors to search for inten-
tion and purpose behind even the 
most seemingly small moments. 
Everything from an entrance to a 
moment of eye contact to an “I’m 
not hungry” is probed and replayed 
to further convey the emotional 
and psychological complexity of 
the interpersonal dynamics at play. 
 

Barnes asks the actors questions 

like “How does it feel that the per-
fect woman is no longer perfect?” 
and asks them to pinpoint moments 
of realization that may not be vocal-
ized, but rather expressed through 
subtlety of facial expression or 
body language.

Barnes explains the process of 

creating “Closer” as one that com-
bines creativity with self-reflection 
to create multidimensional charac-
ters.

“A lot of it is just using your imag-

ination or personal experience and 
putting yourself in the mindset of 
where these characters would be,” 
Barnes said. “Like, ‘What would 
happen if the love of your life sud-
denly walked out the door?’ We talk 
about that, we let that simmer.” 

Closer

Thurs. Febru-
ary 4, 7 p.m 
and 11 p.m. 

Fri. February 
5, 7 p.m. 

Sat. Febru-
ary 6, 7 p.m. 
and 11 p.m.

Walgreen 

Drama Center

Free

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 3, 2016 — 5A

