Let’s face it, summer can put a crimp in your fitness routine. If you’re a runner or a cyclist, hitting the pavement can be a grueling proposition. Ditto for hiking and walking. You can always jump in the pool, but not many of us have Olympic-size swimming pools where we can swim a decent lap. If you don’t belong to a health club or other fitness facility, lap swimming can be a challenge. Here are a few public pools around town where you can cool off while practicing your strokes.

Fancy a bit of friendly swordplay? Our 2014 fitness story on fencing proved prophetic among the Valley's left-of-center sporting enthusiasts: The sport is hotter than ever.

Few people have made a career out of being awkward and deliciously geeky the way actress-vlogger (that’s short for “video blogger,” n00bs) Felicia Day has. Once a shy, home-schooled nerd who wrote poems about “Ultima 7” and spent two hours a day immersed in “World of Warcraft,” the adult Day turned her everyday life into fodder for her Kickstarter-funded web series The Guild and the Geek & Sundry YouTube Channel.

When Samyak Shertok heard the news about the April 2015 earthquake that rocked his home country of Nepal, he was “shattered.” Shertok, an Arizona State University alum, works as a visiting poet at the Mayo Clinic, where he writes poems for palliative care patients as “lyric medicine” through Arizona poet laureate Alberto Rios' Poesia del Sol program. Shertok decided to help his fellow Nepalis cope with the destruction in much the same way he's been helping the Mayo patients cope with their illnesses: the healing power of poetry.

Day laborers reenact the Guatemalan Civil War in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Los Angeles in artist Yoshua Okón's acclaimed 2011 video Octopus. The laborers are also ex-guerillas and veterans of that war. The 18-minute film is, as Los Angeles Times arts critic Leah Ollman noted when Octopus was showing at L.A.'s Hammer Museum, “a heavy conceptual load,” but Mexico-born Okón is almost an  auteur of agitating reenactments. His sequel to Octopus revisits another politically charged event, and uses participants of that event as the reenactors.