Yoga

My Not-So-Triumphant Return to Yoga

Yoga and I are back together once again…and it hurts.

In Sanskrit, yoga means “union,” as in uniting yourself with the divine…however you choose to define the latter. In my language of Hakskrit, it is a union with sweat, pain, and the occasional “how come flabby arms over there can hold that pose (asana) while I, the uber multisport athlete, cannot?

I’ve had the good fortune of training with Steve Ilg in his yoga classes in Los Angeles, a private session with one of his students in Las Vegas, and in his new studio in Flagstaff. I have a wee bit of understanding of the basics and some of the subtleties one needs to be aware of in the various asanas. However, since I can’t make the four-hour drive to Flagstaff every week, all of my yoga over the past two years has come from the killer High Performance Yoga Prop DVD or the gentler QuickFix Power Yoga DVD. As good as those TV lessons are (I have yet to make it through the HP Prop session without collapsing from exhaustion), nothing beats the one-on-one instruction you get from being inside a yoga studio

I noticed that a new yoga place had opened its doors down the road from my home so I paid a visit this past Saturday, liked what I saw, and signed up for a block of 13 classes. I attended a 90-minute Power Flow class the next day.

The hardwood floors, lit candles, and heater cranked up told me I had definitely come to the right place. Out of eight students, I was one of two males and the only student not dressed in proper trendy yoga attire, just shorts and an old cotton T-shirt…OK, an old triathlon race shirt. I had to be somewhat cool. The instructor, Jules, looked to be in great shape and as I later learned, also taught pole-dancing at Pilates studio.

The class didn’t appear to include any Earth Princesses that I’ve see in other yoga studios, and we only had one mega breather in the class. You see, to the newbies, yoga just looks like a bunch of stretching movements with an emphasis on breathing. This one gal in the class kept sighing with every pose and it was good concentration training for me. She required me to focus on my alignment and my breath, rather than my urge to run over and throttle Darth Vader into silence.

We went through various asanas and the teacher would make subtle adjustments to our positions which you don’t get from playing along on TV. We worked sitting, standing, balance drills, and some intro work to inversions and it was all done at a pace based on the student’s own abilities.

While my first class was not particularly difficult, two days later, parts of my anatomy are scolding me. “Hey dude! You forgot about us will all of that triathlon training. Ha ha ha. And you thought being a triathlete was the end-all be-all of athletic performance. Ya dumbass.”

And yes, my dumb ass is just one of the many body parts that are feeling sore, er, well-trained right now.

Other lessons my body taught me from one yoga session:

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I’m better balanced on my right leg than my left. Gee, wonder if that has anything to do with run performance?

My hamstring flexibility is non-existent. Once again, let’s turn to running for that.

My lower back is tighter than a drum and my abs are starting to come alive.

My shoulders, anterior and lateral delts specifically, have been tenderized.

The muscles that retract my scapula (I forget what they’re called at the moment) and give me a strong, proud posture, are letting me know they have been not used for far too long. Too much sitting behind a desk hunched over a computer all day.

All these lessons from one 90-minute class that wasn’t “all that challenging.” Hmmmm.

While I truly have no “off season” like other triathletes, this time of year provides a great opportunity for me to play a bit more with these non-traditional training methodologies and attempt to return balance and strength to my cardiovascular-dominated body.

It’ll be interesting to see what more my body will try to teach me in the weeks ahead.

*******

The yoga gods must be knocking on my doorstep this week. First, the yoga studio’s siren call that lured me in their doors.

Now, an article in a local newspaper that Las Vegas will be hosting the 2007 Asana Yoga Championships on Nov. 3.

Hello?

Yoga as a competitive sport?

I just can’t see the various competitors psyching themselves up before the match and saying, “This is yours man! All yours! Go kick his spandex-wearin’, tofu-eatin’, incense-burnin’ pansy ass. Lay down that Hanumanasana like it’s never been laid down before!”

I just don’t get it. This story reminds me of a yoga competition featured in the satirical online news site, The Onion, back in 1996. Unfortunately, you can’t find it in their archives, but I Googled around and found it for you:

(WORLD NEWS) MONK GLOATS OVER YOGA CHAMPIONSHIP

‘I am the serenest!’ he says

LHASA, TIBET – Employing the brash style that first brought him to prominence, Sri Dhananjai Bikram won the fifth annual International Yogi Competition yesterday with a world-record point total of 873.6.

“I am the serenest!” Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga fans, vigorously pumping his fists. “No one is serener than Sri Dhananjai Bikram – I am the greatest monk of all time!”

Bikram averaged 1.89 breaths a minute during the two-hour competition, nearly .3 fewer than his nearest competitor, second-place finisher and two-time champion Sri Salil “The Hammer” Gupta.

The heavily favored Gupta was upset after the loss. “I should be able to beat that guy with one lung tied,” Gupta said. “I’m beside myself right now, and I don’t mean trans-bodily.”
Bikram got off to a fast start at the Lhasa meet, which like most major competitions, is a six-event affair. In the first event, he attained total consciousness (TC) in just 2 minutes, 34 seconds, and set the tone for the rest of the meet by repeatedly shouting, “I’m blissful! You blissful?! I’m blissful!” to the other yogis.

Bikram, 33, burst onto the international yoga scene with a gold-mandala performance at the 1994 Bhutan Invitational. At that competition he premiered his aggressive style, at one point in the flexibility event sticking his middle toes out at the other yogis. While no prohibition exists against such behavior, according to Yoga League Commissioner Swami Prabhupada, such behavior is generally considered “unBuddhalike.”

“I don’t care what the critics say,” Bikram said. “Sri Bikram is just gonna go out there and do Sri Bikram’s own yoga thing.”

Before the Bhutan meet, Bikram had never placed better than fourth. Many said he had forsaken rigorous training for the celebrity status accorded by his Bhutan win, endorsing Nike’s new line of prayer mats and supposedly dating the Hindu goddess Shakti. But his performance this week will regain for him the number one computer ranking and earn him new respect, as well as for his coach Mahananda Vasti, the controversial guru some have called Bikram’s “guru.”

“My special training diet for Bikram of one super-charged, carbo-loaded grain of rice per day was essential to his win,” Vasti said.

The defeated Gupta denied that Bikram’s taunting was a factor in his inability to attain TC. “I just wasn’t myself today,” Gupta commented. “I wasn’t any self today. I was an egoless particle of the universal no-soul.”

In the second event, flexibility, Bikram maintained the lead by supporting himself on his index fingers for the entire 15 minutes while touching the back of his skull to his lower spine. The feat was matched by Gupta, who first used the position at the 1990 Tokyo Zen-Off.

“That’s my meditative position of spiritual ecstasy, not his,” remarked Gupta. “He stole my thunder.”

Bikram denied the charge, saying, “Gupta’s been talking like that ever since he was a 3rd century Egyptian slave-owner.”

Nevertheless, a strong showing by Gupta in the third event, the shotput, placed him within a lotus petal of the lead at the competition’s halfway point.

But event number four, the contemplation of unanswerable riddles known as koans, proved the key to victory for Bikram.

The koan had long been thought the weak point of his spiritual arsenal, but his response to today’s riddle – “Show me the face you had before you were born” – was reportedly “extremely illuminative,” according to Commissioner Prabhupada.

While koan answers are kept secret from the public for fear of exposing the uninitiated multitudes to the terror of universal truth, insiders claim his answer had Prabhupada and the two other judges “highly enlightened.”

With the event victory, Bikram built himself a nearly insurmountable lead, one he sustained through the yak-milk churn and breathing events to come away with the upset victory.

 

*Yoga Nation infographic from The Onion.

 

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