Where You Can Shove Your Namaste

Day four of hour-long morning workouts saw yoga on the schedule. Now I have said my fair share of anti-yoga things, mostly motivated by the two tragically uncomfortable sessions I participated in during college, but day 4 was yoga day so yoga I would do. After all, I did an hour of plyometrics and was fairly certain nothing could be more crippling than that.

Wrong.

So, while I don't know if I ever called yoga practitioners pussies, I may have thought it, and I would like to humbly take that back. I am the pussy. Now we may have started out on the wrong foot when I discovered that the yoga workout is 90 minutes long, not 60, prompting me to do some calculations about train time and shower time and teeth brushing time, but I am trying to be really game about moving my fat ass in productive ways, so I signed on. The nice man on the screen said some nice stuff about clearing my mind and focusing on the now and then proceeded to ask me to contort my body in ways it had a) never been contorted in before and b) frankly was unable to contort in. How was I supposed to clear my mind while agonizing over the fact that I cannot wrap my right arm underneath my lunged right leg to then hold onto my left hand which was crossed behind my back. I can't even get close. It was that move that did me in. After only thirty minutes I collapsed on my yoga mat and had a good cry.

Yes, I cried during yoga this morning.

A nice, self-pitying cry. Because I am about as flexible as my 95-year-old grandmother. Because I ate bread yesterday and the scale jumped alarmingly (yes, I know, weighing one's self every day is counter-productive, but very difficult to not do). Because I tried to do something and couldn't.

After blowing my nose and breathing normally for a moment, I sobered up. This morning was a bit of a failure. But next week on yoga day, I will attempt to start where I stopped today and see if I can't do at least the next 30 minutes of the workout. Because you know how I loathe defeat. 30 minutes of failyoga is better than 0 minutes of failyoga. Eating grapes today instead of bread is a positive thing as well (and they are good grapes that I will be replenishing after work chez Whole Foods). A lifetime of sloth might, just might, take a little time to fix. And while the other workouts were challenging, they involved things my body was accustomed to doing, which is why I could do them, albeit with a lot of grunting and bitch noises thrown in (you know EXACTLY the noises I mean). Ever since kiddie gymnastics class fail as a five year old, the Yelena has studiously avoided the kind of movement yoga encourages.

So I will work on it.

(seethes slightly more quietly)