Posted by amy at November 2nd, 2007

Oh faithful readers, please join me in celebrating my triumphant first-place-in-my-division 5k Sam Gomez race last weekend. The more observant reader might notice that I actually came in dead last, a good 15 minutes and 86 seconds behind a gentleman competing in the 75 + division, but you would be the same people who see the glass half empty. Running a 5k on a Sunny afternoon in October wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but running it over the age of 75 in under 40 minutes just might be, we’ll see.

A few weeks ago, I gave up my nightly jog for a trip to the attic for yoga. The front of our attic is huge and empty. Earlier this summer, fresh from a weekend visit to a spa with my wonderful mother, I rushed out to home depot and bought a decent sized rug, some candles from pier one and a couple of tapestries later, and I’ve got a yoga studio. I told myself that after the Komen race for the cure, I could move inside.

I didn’t know that I could really make the switch, but one night when I was playing in I-Tunes, I found a great podcast by Hillary Rubin and I’m hooked. If you’d like to try yoga at home, start with one of these. Hillary talks you through each pose with encouragement and advice as if she is in the room with you, watching your body move. “That’s it, now drop your hips a bit, more, that’s it, you got it.”

And yet it is incredibly challenging, both physically and intellectually, because Hillary primarily uses the Sanskrit terms and I just didn’t pay enough attention in yoga classes in the past to match the Sanskrit name to the names I’m familiar with “downward dog” “mountain pose” “wind relieving posture”. I’ve got two yoga books up there with me, one of which is stick figures in poses with names like “bend over” and the other has lots of great images, but is lacking in a Sanskrit index.

Tonight I hit a stumbling block with “Vashistasana to Wild Thing” which brought me down here to my computer, and the urge to share Hillary with you.

I needed a man in my i-pod to get me off the couch and onto a 5k, and now I’m hooked on a woman telling me to drop my heart into my hands and release. I could give up my cell phone today, but you’ll have to fight me for my i-pod.

Vashistasana
photography by James Wvinner