Yogic Trying..

Tonight I’m back on the mat for the first time in a while. A long while in fact – while harvesting the original post for my single previous experience of what I’ve come to think of as low impact yoghurt, the date was back in 2007. I’m sure it was really about two Fridays ago, or maybe the week before that.

How can it be 2007? Anyway I expect I’ll be even more useless and quite a lot more sweaty. Attempting to stand up after the Monday spin class sometimes feels like I’m overachieving, so I expect to find myself slumped in the corner of the Gym with various joints popping and clicking after about five minutes.

Which is about all you need to read that article from 2007.

Anyone for Yoda?

 

In preparation for a date with a destiny, that I would happily have run over broken glass to break, my early evening reading was the refreshingly kaftan Mung Bean Times incorporating ˜What Lentil’. Yes, dear readers, I’m going to admit on an open blog “ or Chronicle of Angst as I’m increasingly thinking of it as “ that a relatively healthy and not totally mental bloke went to Yoga.

The vision that’s impossible to shake is made up of a room full of Cassandras’ and Skys’ clothed in tie-die shirts and leg warmers, chanting runic base lines and inserting purple painted toes into jewellery infested ears. Add a dash of dreary music easily categorised into relaxing tunes to slash your wrists by and some way out hippy imploring us to locate our inner child, and the whole foot laceration begins to look like the less painful option.

Obviously there were no blokes except me and a few of the women were certainly of the original bra burning generation. But not all of them “ one of which was my wife as I cravenly refused to go on my own. In case someone gave me a jostick and insisted on adorning my person with occult jewellery. And as for the instructor “ well let me tell about Darcie, who is supple enough to throw a leg carelessly into the next room while elegantly rotating on a single finger. And “ apparently I didn’t really notice as Carol was yoga-matted right next to me “ she was pretty damn hot too. Fellas, consider this “ extremely athletic, the perfect figure and probably susceptible to the odd recreational pharmaceutical. Quite a combination I should think, if I were thinking about it. Which I’m not but the rest of you, go fill your boots. Or something.

Anyway it was bloody hard “ stop sniggering at the back “ and while ladies who lunch stretched languid muscles with irritating ease, I was all trembling veins and slouchy posture. Twenty years of cycling has reduced my hamstrings to a length better suited to a 10 year old child. Whereas my flexibility would be better matched to an 80 year old man with arthritis. Or possibly rigour mortis.

Blokes generally like lifting big weights or sweating in a manly manner while sucking in their gut and thrusting everything pelvic in the opposite direction. But this isn’t like that at all, it’s all the pain you can handle by pitting opposing muscles in an uber bitch fight and there really aren’t any winners. Except “ and it’s not without some grudging am I writing this “ an hour later, all sorts of previously unseen rotational vistas had opened up.

Thankfully for all my stereotyping, mung bean made a late entry into proceeding when we all had a much needed lie down with the lights off. Someone even brought a blanket. I was doing my best to relax but¦ (edited for reasons of not wishing to die horribly by cheese grater) instead found myself thinking that this wasn’t quite as silly as originally envisaged.

As the great man/dwarf/Jedi may once have said Practise the art of Yoga or touch your toes you will not. I had a far better line for the old loppy eared one but the thought of the cheese grater made me reconsider.

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