Man vs Yoga

In an attempt to live up to the name of the Blog, I have made several changes since crossing the first-marathon finish line back in March, both in my running life and my personal life. I’ll try and cover those in another blog post as a way for me to personally take inventory, and share some of the results of those changes. One change that I’ve been slowly working up to is adding Yoga into my cross-training mix, and last night I finally got my Yoga on.

 

*Not pictured: Me

 

Kind of hard to really give a review of the experience since it was a lot of stopping and watching the video to figure out what exactly they were doing, but overall I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my training. I did a 60-minute base strength routine, and by the end of the routine I think I had most of the sequences and poses figured out. Synchronizing the movements with the breathing is going to be a bit of a challenge, and in the many words I’ve used to describe me ‘graceful’ is not one, so I’m sure it wasn’t pretty, but pretty is not what I’m shooting for. First impressions:

• Despite having done my PT stretches every day, and sometimes twice daily, for almost 2 months, I’m still crazy inflexible, mostly in my hamstrings. Didn’t help that of the three people in the video doing the movements, the guy could have bent over and touched the toes of a person standing downstairs from where they were shooting. However, by the end of the session I was within striking distance of my toes when I bent over.  Dare to dream.
• Really need to move the furniture around in the kids’ playroom if that’s where I’m going to keep doing this. I’d like to say that is a function of Feng Shui to allow for proper Namaste, but it’s actually a function of making it look more like yoga and less like me practicing martial arts on the couch, chairs, and anything else unfortunate enough to be within my YogaJudo reach.
• Need to close the door so my kids and/or the puppy don’t come in every 10 minutes to see what’s going on. Hard to get centered when someone’s asking you how much longer until they can use the Wii.
• Think I may need a bigger yoga mat. Don’t know if there are actually different sizes, but I’m using my wife’s mat and I was having a hard time staying within the mat boundaries. Again probably more a function of my Yoga-ninja impression than the mat, but it’s easier to blame inanimate objects.

In other news, we’re mourning the death of the hard drive on our Tivo. I’m not a big TV watcher, so the Tivo meltdown wasn’t a big deal to me, but dead Tivo = unhappy Mrs. Evolving. We were one of the first folks to jump on the Tivo bandwagon many years ago, and although we’re on our third box we’ve rarely had any issues, but Friday night Mr. Tivo went into full Hard-Drive-Cardiac-Arrest, and despite our best efforts we weren’t able to revive him. Casualties included the not-yet-watched final episode of Lost, the last 6 episodes of Season 2 of True Blood (also not yet watched), and the season finale of Biggest Loser. Aside from my wife being highly displeased with the lost shows, it made for an interesting social experiment with my kids, who have never really experienced real-time TV, where you can’t pause, rewind, pick a recorded show from a menu, etc. It was actually pretty funny. Already ordered a replacement hard-drive, and surgery should be complete by the end of the week, but in the meantime the family is living like savages, having to watch shows when they actually come on the air.

 

Running right now is a bit of a mixed bag. Had a great run on Saturday where all of the body parts felt like they should. Yesterday I went 6.3 miles, the longest I’ve tried to run since my knee turned sad, and had a fair amount of heel pain. My right heel has been getting increasingly more sore over the last couple weeks, which appears to be the early onset of plantar fasciitis. Good news is that my knee is doing really well, but the traveling hurt seems to have taken up residence on the bottom of my foot now. Icing, stretching, etc. to try and get it stopped and turned for the better. We’ll see where that goes.

 

Realized on yesterday’s run that it’s time to invest in a running hat. Anybody have any suggestions? Stopped at the local Inside-Out-Sports over the weekend to see what they had, but they all had a giant store logo on the front, and I’d rather not be a moving billboard.