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Yoga Journal's Makeover Blogs
« April 2007 |
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| June 2007 »
The week that the article about my yoga makeover came out, I first found out from my friends who have subscriptions to Yoga Journal. I got a few phone calls and some e-mails, including one from an old friend who I hadn't seen in a few years. It was a little shocking, to say the least. Having an article about you in a national publication is a pretty exposing thing. And, having that article focus on a private struggle is even more daunting.
While I wouldn't call myself a particularly private person, this was a lot even for me. In the spirit of the project, I turned to yoga to try to deal with my disquiet about the article. It turned out to be an effective tool. I spent a couple days focusing on restorative poses. I did a lot of forward bends and other seated poses, and spent a long time in Savasana. I was really trying to use the practice to obtain a sense of peace and balance with myself, which worked really well. Ironically, much of my disquiet was anticipatory. It was actually a few weeks after the article came out that I actually was able to get a copy for myself. By then, the yoga had calmed me down and I was able to really enjoy the article.
I ran a marathon last week and discovered just how little endurance training one can (or cannot) get away with when it comes to running a marathon. In preparing for this event, my run training has been extremely minimal. For the last two months, I ran only twice a week—one longer endurance-building run on the weekends, and one short interval-style workout midweek. The longest run I did was 18 miles. While the running has been minimal, I maintained a consistent yoga practice throughout this time—public classes 1-2 times per week, home practice 2-3 times per week, and then a longer private lesson with Jason once every two weeks. From the perspective of conventional marathon training programs, I knew I was grossly under-prepared. But I was also eager to see if yoga might enhance my performance.
A marathon is 26.2 miles, and the longest training run I did leading up to this event was only 18 miles. As it turned out, I had a superb race—that is, until about mile 20. That's when I completely hit the wall. I was holding a consistently fast pace, feeling fit and strong, and running better than ever. But fatigue started to creep in during mile 19, and at mile 20, I bonked. My legs started getting extremely sore. With 6.2 miles still to go, I suddenly felt like I had nothing left in me.
Luckily I was accompanied by three excellent friends—my training partner Ryan and my friends Craig and Jim who are both highly experienced marathoners and ultra-distance runners—who used every trick in the book to keep me going. Craig is doing a 100-miler ultra-marathon later this yea, and Jim is a true veteran more than 40 marathons under his belt and finish-times under 2 hours 50 minutes. Craig and Jim had both taken time off from running and were just "easing back into training" by doing this marathon at my snail's pace! So when I started to get extremely fatigued, Craig and Jim gave me pep talks, mile after mile. They motivated me all the way to the finish-line. Thanks to them, I had no choice but to keep going even though my legs were screaming in agony.
After the race, my friends remarked on how my running form looked excellent and relaxed, with efficient biomechanics even when I was in complete agony. For this reason, they kept coaching me to pick up the pace because they were convinced that I had more left in the tank. And despite the fact that I had bonked at mile 20 and crawled at what felt like a snail's pace for the final 6 miles, it turned out I still broke my personal record by several minutes! (With a finish time of 3 hours, 42 minutes.)
Hindsight is 20/20. If I could prepare for this marathon all over again, I would have started training two weeks earlier to allow for two additional training runs of, say, 20 miles and 23 miles. My endurance fitness was simply insufficient leading up to this marathon, and yoga is not going to give me that extra fitness. But I would not have traded the yoga for anything. I believe the training plan of running and yoga was an ideal balance. I attribute my greatly improved running biomechanics entirely to my yoga practice. Now more than ever, I am convinced that yoga will be an indispensable part of my training program for my first Ironman triathlon.
Since I've started doing yoga, I've wanted to have one week where I practiced every day. It doesn't seem like such a big goal, but, as I'm sure many of you can appreciate, carving out space to practice each day is challenging when you have so many demands on your time. Despite the challenge, I really want to see how it feels to get a daily dose of yoga. I was hoping that this week I would do it. Things started out on the right note. Monday and Tuesday I had a vigorous home practice and Wednesday I met with Jason. We worked on taking the Sun Salutations and flowing from them straight into standing poses. I loved it. I really felt like I could put together the pieces of what I've learned into a fluid, almost dance-like series of movements, and for the first time I understood the concept of flow as it applies to yoga. It also made me see how much each yoga pose fits into other yoga poses. I think I realized that in concept, but my home practice has always been a bit choppy. I do one pose, then stop and adjust and move into the next pose and I continue on like that for the rest of the practice. It's rewarding, but this was something entirely different.
Then I missed Thursday. I can't even recall precisely why. I'm sure it was some combination of friends and wine and food, but whatever the reason, I couldn't bring myself to practice. And on Friday, I was so bummed that I hadn't accomplished my goal that I skipped again. I got it back together on Saturday, and tried to really incorporate the flow methods that I had worked on with Jason. And on Sunday, I took a class so it ended up being five out of seven days. Not bad, but not quite what I was going for either.
One of these weeks, I'm going to practice for seven days straight. I'm not sure why I've fixated on this as a goal, but I have. I want to prove to myself that I can do it, but more importantly, I want to see what it feels like. Yoga brings to the surface misalignments that I wasn't aware of. The more yoga I do, the more awareness I achieve. But the memory fades on the days in between the practice. I think that if I remove those days, at least for a short period of time, my awareness will be heightened and I'll be able to pinpoint the things that push me off balance. Maybe not.But I won't know until I try, which is why each week on Monday I start with the intention of including in my week a daily dose of yoga.
I'll say straight away that I shamelessly stole this title from an article that a friend of mine sent me about yoga. When I read it, the article really resonated with me but after a few more months of yoga, I think I've finally started to really understand what the author was getting at. When you're heavy like I am, self consciousness about your body permeates everything you do. In truth, that statement probably applies to almost every women I've met, whether she's heavy or slender, but the difference for the heavy person is that you feel like you're being judged in a less-than-postiive way all the time. So when you feel like you can't do something because of your size, it's like being cut off at the knees. That happens in yoga more than I would like. There are certain poses that I just can't do. It has nothing to do with tightness—it's about the size and shape of my body. Seated twists, for example. My legs are short and they're wide so getting one leg all the way over the other leg with my foot on the floor, and then putting my elbow on my knee just won't happen. When I realized this for the first time in a class I was mortified. It wasn't just that I couldn't do the pose, but that I couldn't do the pose because my body was all wrong. It brought back every size insecurity I've ever had because, of course, in my head the fact that I couldn't do the pose means there's something wrong with my body.
One of my biggest struggles has been to come to grips with this and to recognize that not all poses work for all body types, and that there's no shame in using props to compensate for short arms or tight hamstrings. Or that sometimes, certain poses aren't for you. The truth is, the "proper" yoga postures don't work for everyone.
I read somewhere that one of the goals of yoga is to push your body to the edge, and then relax into that edge. How you get there can be subtly different depending on your shape. If that wasn't the case, then yoga would only be for the select few who happen to have the body type that's most amenable to the poses. And I suspect that even for those folks, some poses don't quite work the way they'd like them to. Admittedly, it's not always easy to embrace this wisdom in the moment. When I attempt a pose that my body just doesn't want to do, I have to fight off the insidious sense that yoga just isn't for my body and remember that yoga as a discipline doesn't judge. It's benefit is for everybody and every body that wants to embrace it.
This week my partner Dave and I have been visiting his parents in Stillwater, Oklahoma (home of Oklahoma State University). I went online to search for yoga in Stillwater and found the website of a teacher named Carol Bender ( www.benderyoga.com). I giggled and thought "Bender. What a great name for a yoga teacher!" Then, I decided I had to try her classes.
Since San Francisco is sort of a mecca for yoga in America, I've been spoiled by our choice of wonderful studios and brilliant teachers of every flavor of yoga. So I was curious to see what one could find in a small town like Stillwater, Oklahoma. There's not a whole lot to do around here. So beside raiding Dave's parents' very well-stocked fridge, and helping with small tasks in his dad's beautiful organic vegetable garden, "Bender Yoga" was to be my big adventure for the week.
To my pleasant surprise Carol's classes were absolutely superb! She has a wonderful presence and energy about her. The small class size (5 to 7 people) created an intimate environment and opportunity for individual guidance. I attended two of her classes (at two different locations) and loved both of them. It appears that her classes were attended by a small loyal group of regulars. Carol welcomed this out-of-town visitor with warm open arms, and I had the most wonderful practice. Then the big shocker was the low-low price—the Tuesday class was $5 and the Wednesday class, regularly $7, was free for first-timers!
Afterward, I reflected on what a labor of pure love it is that Carol teaches these phenomenal yoga classes for such tiny fees. In San Francisco, her classes would be $12-15 or more each and probably attended by many more students. Clearly Carol does not teach for the money. (As it turns out, thanks to my google-stalking skills, she is a professor and research scientist at OSU with a rather impressive Curriculum Vitae.) Money aside, it occurs to me how much easier it is to maintain a high level of yoga practice in a place like SF with its popularity and abundant choices of studios, workshops, conferences, teacher-training programs, etc. Yoga is clearly thriving in San Francisco, but not nearly the same in Oklahoma. To me, Carol is a hero for bringing such quality yoga instruction so lovingly to this small town.
Carol, if you're reading this blog, thank you for having me in your wonderful classes and thank you even more for bringing the joy of yoga and meditation practice to your community! You're a gem!
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