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Jacksonville, FL, United States
In Life as well as in running the secret is Pace.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Yoga and Running and Sleep


That pretty much sums up what I did this past weekend.

We signed up for a yoga seminar instead of a Duathlon…  Now Judi comes along on plenty of junkets with me (do-it-yourself Ultramarathons, cyclocross races, centuries, long distance ocean swims) that I'm sure push her beyond her comfort zone.

In fact two of the parenthized (is that a word?) items above she has vowed to never do again.

With that in mind, when she asked me to do a weekend yoga seminar I acquiesced…

The seminar was led by Kathryn Budig and was 4 sessions.


Friday night, Saturday (morning and afternoon), and Sunday morning.

During the first session she asked how many people in the class were yoga instructors…  over half of the hands in the class went up…  and so did my level off apprehension.

A funny thing happened tho…  I focused…  and decided that the best way to not look like a doofus was to pay close attention and try to do exactly what I was told to do.

I made it through the Friday session unscathed…. And surprised myself that I was able to at least go through most of the steps to get into each pose.

We got up Saturday morning and dutifully ran our 12 miles in 2 hours…  a bright beautiful morning… then showered, ate, and drove back to the yoga class.

More of the same trepidation….  Followed by calm focus and resolve ensued.

I was not able to even begin some poses…  like this one Judi could do…  so I took her picture.


The Saturday AM session was all about inversions… 

And to my complete surprise I was able to do scorpion pose:


As well as tripod and did some decent handstands

The afternoon session was all about hip openers…  not quite as much fun but excellent stretching and therapy for this old runner's hips.

Sunday morning was all about back bends…  and I was once again under enthused.  It turned out to be okay because in order to do a backbend you need to be  really flexible in the quad and psoas…  so we spent an hour or so stretching and working those areas.
After yoga we had a 4 hour run to do…  which we knocked out like a couple of yeomen.

We started basically in the center of the city and after doing a loop of the downtown bridges we began to work our way upriver as evidenced by this sequence of pictures.





We finished the weekend off with homemade pizza and a nice bottle of wine.

And sleep…  much needed sleep.

2 comments:

Matthew Smith said...

Nope, I'm not much of a Yoga fan at all. But, that being said, I've only done the P90X yoga, and that takes forever!

You're a beast to do the scorpion. That's craziness!

Will Cooper said...

wish I could do yoga...but i'm afraid of it. don't want to one more thing to slice me up when i need to be put back together! you are very brave.

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