There is way too much snow in Massachusetts right now. It's nice to have a winter for a month while I'm home, and the snow is very pretty. Unfortunately, there has been entirely too much snow (and sleet, and slush) in the past few days and it has interfered with my extreme training regiment. And by that I mean I have not been able to go running every day, and I think I can feel my muscles atrophying. Also, I'm not a member of a gym right now, because it just didn't make financial sense to join for a month. So I've been holed up in my house looking for a summer job. This is not how I wanted to spend my time in the States.
Today I finally reached my wits' end, and I signed up for a yoga class. Yoga is something that I've always associated with young urban professionals-- yuppies. I'm not trying to hate on yoga (or yuppies), because it's great for your body and it is, in fact, challenging. It's just that I usually associate exercise with moving quickly in some specific direction, not staring at the ground while levitating in an awkward, compromising position and hoping I'm not mooning the people behind me. Anyway, I showed up at the yoga class imagining that I would leave at the end of an hour feeling disappointed and not at all tired. I was mistaken.
One of my character flaws is that I hate doing things that I'm bad at. Therefore, I have trouble motivating myself to learn new things, because I hate humiliating myself in the beginning. Recent things I have learned that exemplify this attitude include tennis, backgammon, and neuroscience. I would add Turkish to the list but I haven't given up on that just yet. Yoga, it turns out, is also one of these things, and I was quickly reminded why I don't do yoga more often when the class started. Am I the only one who thinks downward facing dog is challenging, and not really that rejuvenating? And while I have sufficient strength to move a boat and pull a relatively good split on an ergometer, it turns out that I really can't balance my whole body weight on my wrists and forearms in peacock pose. Furthermore, the instructor, kind and helpful as she was, repeatedly came up to me to offer me help. It was sweet, but I had already drawn enough attention to myself by laughing out loud at my inflexibility, and I really didn't want any more pity smiles and patronizing encouragement. While balancing on one leg and twisting my back towards the sky, I couldn't help but relate my experience to the yoga scene from the best movie in the world, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Especially when my instructor said that beginners should feel comfortable laying on their mats in child's pose. I'm pretty sure I was the only beginner. Wounds salted.
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