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Exercise

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Run Home

Long-distance running is the dogged refusal to bend to the way you feel. It is the accommodation of pain. If you run long enough, far enough, fast enough, you will carve out a place in yourself where pain can live.

By Margo Steines July 2023
The Sun Interview

The Strong, Silent Type

Jaclyn A. Siegel On Masculinity And Male Body Image

Risak: How is the “masculine body” defined?

Siegel: In the U.S. we typically see a mesomorphic ideal: lean, muscular, and with a low body-fat percentage. This is persistent across the U.S. and common in LGBTQ+ communities in particular. Sexual-minority men are at elevated risk for eating disorders due in part to the lean ideal being perpetuated in their communities.

By Sam Risak February 2023
Poetry

Preparations

You can prepare for some things. / Others fall on you like / meteors ripping open the sky.

By Bill Glose September 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Love Running

Running is better for me than church; better than counseling, pills, or meditation; better than diet plans or twelve-step meetings. Running keeps me literally on the straight and narrow.

By Joseph Holt March 2019
Poetry

An Image Of Godliness

Like the Turin shroud with / its image of godliness, / her yoga mat holds / the tattoo of her body, each pose / immortalized by a particular / indentation, a stain of perspiration.

By Gerry LaFemina July 2014
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Summit Fever

Impossibly bright stars fill the sky like silver glitter sprayed from a fire hose. And, to our good fortune, we’ve chosen to climb on the night of the summer’s largest meteor shower. Each shooting star is like a Roman candle.

By Davy Rothbart January 2014
Fiction

Do You Know How Much I Love You?

We lived in a small yellow three-bedroom ranch on a dead-end street with no circle to turn around in: the street just ended. I had my own room, and my younger sister, Jody, had hers. There were big bay windows in front and a deck off the back, and my father built the house himself.

By Annie Weatherwax January 2011
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

No Sweat

Standing at the entrance to the aerobics room, I think, All I have to do is get through the next forty-five minutes. I tell myself that kickboxing sounds like fun, not dreadful or boring. I chose kickboxing because it resembles martial arts — something I studied briefly in the past.

By Angela Winter May 2010
Poetry

Selected Poems

from “A Pittsburgh Poem” | Imagine a man in a hat on a street early one morning in autumn. / This is my grandfather on his way to work at the brokerage firm. / He is a treasurer. He takes the bus down from the southern hills. / It is October 28, 1929.

By Brian Doyle February 2010
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

My Vertigo

My vertigo came on suddenly. It was past midnight, and I was listening to Coltrane for Lovers and doing the dishes when I began to wobble.

By Sparrow June 2009