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