Hi everyone,
Exercise is so hot right now. (And always. And forever.)
But wait. Hot as in…sweaty? Hot as in…on fire with the intensity of strong athletic performance? Or hot as in “damn, I look good in this shapewear designed to give the illusion of a thong line”?
Choose your fighter, but self-image when exercising is complicated no matter how you feel the heat. This week’s essay runs (ahem) with these complications — towards exercise enlightenment.
Head for the hills,
The Prism Team
Ana Monroe is an artist, human-centered designer, and former civil servant proudly fired by DOGE in early 2025. She lives in Los Angeles with her family, where she is leaning into the former two, having been prevented from being the latter. Subscribe to her writing about running at Stoic Running.
One thing that makes Ana feel well: “A night’s untroubled sleep and waking up naturally in the morning.”
Running towards embarrassment (and away from shame).
When I was eight, I cared about what I looked like. I was a round kid with a tendency to turn red when crying or exercising. But when I was eight, I was also very, very bored after school. My school had a cross country team, and there was a cool fifth grader who ran on it and was for some reason willing to talk to me at practice. So I joined the team and started running every day. I immediately loved running. I loved how free I felt when I was doing it; I loved how challenging it was; I loved talking to the Cool Girl while we trained.
As I got older, I imagined myself as Steve Prefontaine, all flowing hair and graceful stride, or perhaps Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, glistening attractively with the sweat of the righteous.
Then, sometime in my late 20s, maybe when the Great Recession knocked my career on its ass, I started feeling less like Pre and Linda and more like Phil Dunphy power-walking: lots of frantic motion, questionable technique, and an overall aesthetic that suggests mechanical failure. Sometimes this feeling is reinforced by others’ comments: a friend recently reminded me of my reality at dinner when she said, "I saw you once when you were running, and I thought 'OMG my friend is insane! She's going so fast! She's really sweating!'" I knew she meant it as a compliment, but I felt like I was simultaneously seeing every store window reflection of my big-thighed, red-faced self schlepping down a sidewalk. If I smoked, I would have dragged hard on my cig right then.
But my friend’s comment — or maybe my reaction to it — made me think about how running has that unique power to reveal the absurd gap between our mental self-image and our physical reality. We are minds inside bodies that betray us at the most inopportune moments. On a daily basis, my sweat glands don't care that I’m hoping to look contemplatively athletic rather than desperately overheated.
The real comedy emerges when we examine what we're actually embarrassed about. Social norms dictate that we should feel shame about trying too hard at stuff — about sweating ungracefully, and about resembling gelatinous blobs while pursuing our fitness goals. But these norms reveal themselves as arbitrary. Why should it be embarrassing to have a human body that acts like a human body? Why should we feel shame about the natural consequences of physical exertion? Why should we be expected to effortlessly attain what we strive for?