What Exercise Can’t Do For Terminal Illness. And What It Can Do.

Diagnosed with a frightening illness, people can do frightening things–like take the fear, anger and sadness to the gym, every day, for periods of time that a healthy person might find disturbing. Are they running towards health, or running away from illness. Geezer thinks it’s academic: They’re just running, and just running is just fine, so observers should just chill. Now comes the New York Times with a sensibly modest piece about this not uncommon response to very scary news. “Faced with a chronic condition or a terminal diagnosis,” writes Bethany Lyttle, “some
individuals start training regimens that even the healthiest of us
would find taxing. And the result is a fascinating if somewhat
incongruous equation: people fighting sickness or disease who are, at
the same time, in the best shape of their lives.”
Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, tells the Times that “It’s not always as simple as some sort of headlong rush into denial or a desire for supreme control. People who have a close brush with their own mortality sometimes experience a reaction akin to separation anxiety. A separation that, in this case, is from life.”
Dangers of the manic response, the Times warns, include pushing oneself too hard, or coming to believe that extreme fitness will carry one back to a full and healthy life.Benefits include gaining some sense of control over a body that is otherwise out of control. And living just a little bit harder.
Read more in the New York Times.