Shopping was a skilled but painful exercise, as one woman observed:

It has been a grueling, painful and humbling exercise.

This could be a painful exercise and made it difficult to obtain an accurate altitude for the sun.

Packing for my early extraction was another tiresome and painful exercise in loss.

It's a rather painful exercise, but probably worth it in the long run.

Burke turned his head from side to side, a painful exercise, and tried to figure out exactly where he was.

Not that drawing up the list - or rather, whittling it down - was a wholly painful exercise.

Harry S. was a 60-year-old news reporter when the same disorder turned his once-fluid interviews into slow and painful exercises.

Interviews could be painful exercises containing little that was self-revealing.

And the later we restructure, the more painful the exercise.