Going to the gym is the bane of my existence. I'm not an athletic person and there's almost nothing I despise more than getting up at 6AM every morning so I can check my email, drink a requisite cup of coffee, and get in a bit of exercise before catching the subway to work. But I do it. Every flippin' day, I command myself to do this thing I hate because I know it's good for me. Well, and because that's when I listen to NPR.

I developed a love of public radio when I was living in the stationary city of Atlanta, GA. To combat the notorious inertia of commuter traffic in and out of the southern metropolis, I tuned my station to NPR. Near the left the dial (a symbolic reflection of its politics?), I was introduced to the soothing voice of Terry Gross as she deftly interviewed the likes of actor John Malkovich, illustrator Marjane Satrapi, and musician Booty Collins – all with the same volume of couth and rigor. These stimulating conversations helped get me through a year of substitute teaching in some of the most challenging schools in the metro Atlanta area by providing a space of calm for my inevitably frazzled end-of-the-workday mind. So, when it came to going to the gym, this should have been a piece of cake. But it wasn’t.

Truth be told, I’d rather be baking that piece of cake (and I’m not a baker) than chugging along on a treadmill or straining to do just one chin up – on an assisted machine no less. I’m not obese person, or even overweight; I’m considered “normal” and healthy for a person my height and heft. It’s just that I’m tall and solid and I don’t like to exercise. I didn’t play sports as a child because my single mother of three didn’t have the money to pay for afterschool programs. So, I never got into the habit of seeing physical activity as fun. I saw it as something to be resented and envied, something other kids could do that I couldn’t. And eventually I convinced myself I didn’t want to play sports anyway. Who wants to be a dumb jock?

Later in college, as a campus activist who was developing a feminist consciousness, I wrote off going to the gym as “something anorexic girls do.” And god forbid I be mistaken for one of those. At eighteen years old, I was too cool to care about my body, and too much of a feminist dogmatist to make the connection between working out and health. And to be honest, if I had paid much attention and become more self-aware then, I might have realized that starving my body of exercise was probably just as bad as starving myself of food. Maybe worse, because in my case, I had a political justification to obfuscate self-delusion.

On my last birthday, I turned thirty years old. And while I didn’t have some cliché crisis about my age, I did finally admit that I must start taking better care of myself. Being vegetarian isn’t enough when you’re eating a ton of simple carbs without getting any cardio. So, I gave myself a birthday present: a membership to the gym.

The first visit was pretty excruciating. Lady Gaga was blasting at me from every possible angle and all I could see in any mirror-laden direction was the scowl on my sweaty face. The seconds dragged and I searched for an excuse to skip out early. Truth be told, I only stayed the full hour because my partner had come with me, and I didn’t want to cut his workout short by asking him to leave. So, I spent the time silently pondering how to make these daily excursions a little less miserable. The answer dawned on me: NPR.

If you look at my iPod, you’ll find that it contains absolutely no music – only podcasts. As I’m lacing up my sneakers, the familiar voices of journalists fill my ears and it’s go time. If I can stay focused on what Culturetopia’s Neda Ulaby has to say about Steve Harvey’s fruitless attempts to appeal to white people then I can make it through my warm up on the treadmill. By concentrating on the comedic banter of the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew, I find a way to ignore the fact that my heart is pounding at 160 beats per minute. Soon enough my workout is finished and I make a break for the showers, pondering the new knowledge I've just been exposed to and giddy about what I might learn the following day: perhaps the mysterious homing ability of pigeons or a review roundup of Freedom.

My method isn’t foolproof and sometimes it results in a gaff, like laughing out loud at Radiolab’s investigative antics or stifling a sob elicited from a story told at The Moth. I’ve solicited more than a few concerned glances at my seemingly bizarre behavior. But I do what I need to do in order to pull through yet another morning of reticence and resistance. You see, what I’m shedding isn’t pounds; it’s the past. And in my case, NPR is beneficial for both my body and my mind.