In Dogged Pursuit of Fitness

Talk about puppy love. For a while, Kirk Cameron (formerly of “Growing Pains”) was spending all day with one doggy or another. Daytime, he was working alongside canine co-star Bogus, a Saint Bernard-golden retriever mix, while the two filmed Disney’s TV movie “You Lucky Dog.” By sunset, Cameron was taking walks on the beach with the family dogs, Mike and Rose. Now that the shoot is over--the movie premieres at 7 p.m. Saturday on the Disney Channel--Cameron, 27, and his wife, Chelsea, are back to their normal workout routine.

“We hike a lot up in the Santa Monica Mountains,” Cameron said during a phone interview. The couple, married seven years, have a 2-year-old son. “And we take our little guy with us in a backpack, which definitely adds a workout there.”

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Question: I want to know who’s actually carrying that backpack.

Answer: Well, I’m pretty much the pack mule. I put the 30 pounds on my back.

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Q: Do you do any exercising by yourself?

A: My son gets me up at 5:30, but I go running up in the hills at about 7 pretty much every other day. And then on the days off, we’re either hiking the trails or walking on the beach. So that’s pretty much what we do most of the time. And as far as eating goes, we must have Italian in our blood or something, because we eat pasta all the time.

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Q: For breakfast, what would you grab?

A: Well, on the days it’s not just coffee and a slice of toast, oh, let’s see what do we have? Oatmeal with fruit, or cold cereal with fruit and toast and coffee. And then lunch is usually either leftovers from dinner--usually pasta with different kinds of sauces or a big salad. And then at dinner time, we’ll usually have pasta, or grill chicken or fish, and we have salad and vegetables. We have a little garden in the back, too, so we grow herbs, tomatoes and beans.

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Q: What do you guys drink throughout the day?

A: Mostly water and juice. We’ve got apple juice in the house because of our little boy, so we’re always drinking that. If we go out to dinner, he’s got his hands in our water glasses half the time, so I’m drinking the juice out of his bottle. That’s the only clean thing on the table.

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Q: What were some of the more rigorous parts of filming with Bogus?

A: I turn into a dog in this movie, so the two of us are in the living room jumping up and down on the couch and shredding the pillows and tearing the stuffing out of ‘em and digging up bones in the backyard, and by the end of this--each day we had these kinds of scenes--the dog was just exhausted and I’d come home sore just from digging up these bones. I mean, there were times when under my arms were sore just from digging so much.

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Q: You were using muscles you don’t usually use.

A: Yeah, really. I mean, how often do you dig up bones, you know? So, it was quite a workout on some of the days. And I had to wear elbow or kneepads underneath the clothes because in half the movie I’m running around on my hands and knees or chasing cats and squirrels, so it was pretty physical.

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Q: Bogus probably outpaced you during the chase scenes.

A: Oh, yeah. I mean, you could never keep up with a dog like that.

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Guest Workout runs Mondays in Health.