Day 20 Consider Yourself Warned
I’ve reached that stage in an exercise program where my body has reached a plateau, neither improving (as far as I can tell) nor leaving me in a limp puddle of humiliation after a class.
Now, they tell me, it becomes a mental challenge.
NOW it becomes mentally challenging?? I don’t know what that means, exactly. From day one, it’s been a mental challenge to stay in posture when my hamstrings are screaming. It’s a mental challenge just to get to class every day. It’s a social situation, which automatically makes it mental challenging for me. And NOW it’s getting started??
I’m scared.
But I have noticed one thing, and maybe this is what they’re talking about. I’m pretty damn proud of myself. Yessiree, bob, I’ve made it 20 days in a row. Yup, lotta sweat. Lotta laundry.
And I’m not afraid to talk about it. To wear yoga clothes all day, every day, to be make-up free and proud, to casually practice postures while waiting in bank line-ups. (All part of the social challenge referenced above.)
“You run marathons,” I might comment at a cocktail party. “How nice for you. I,” pause for effect, “do yoga. Bikram yoga. The hot kind. Here, feel my abs. FEEL THEM!”
If I’ve had a glass of wine, it can quickly devolve into an anatomy lesson, a sort of reverse sexual assault. Which you’d think would make me popular at parties, but no. Apparently I do something weird with my eyes that frightens people.
Mental challenge, pshaw. It’s a mental challenge every day, just to be me. Bring it on, I say. BRING IT ON!
Day 19 Dig deeper – thar’s muscle under that thar flab.
In a brillliant example of value-added service, my yoga studio provides massage therapy with a magic-fingered woman named Laura. I’ve been going to Laura every two weeks for several months now, and between that and the yoga, my back and neck have never felt better.
So now, of course, she’s trying to get to the bottom (har-har) of my hip problem. Yesterday, before we got started, I showed her which part of my right hip was keeping me up at night. She got into it, explaining about the hip flexors, the tensor fasciae latae, the iliopsoas, where they originate, where they attach to other structures, how they shorten and tighten due to (you’ll never guess) too much sitting.
“So, we’ll work on these today, okay?” she said brightly. She says everything brightly. “We’ll start with you lying on your back today.”
That’s when I realized I should have waxed.
What followed was a whole new kind of pain. I expect it when I go to Laura – a deep-tissue massage is the only way to fly – but these small, iron-like bands apparently rule my groin like little dictators in obscure countries. You don’ like da way I work? I keel you all.
“I noticed some tension in the left hip too,” she said afterwards. “Did you notice?”
Um yeah, Laura. I noticed. That was when I was white-knuckling the sheet.
“Next time, we’ll work both sides then. Don’t forget to use ice tonight,” she continued. Brightly. “You’re going to need it.”
*
Later:
Despite my fear that Laura had unleashed enough toxins, inflammatory products and demons to make me even more wimpy than usual in my practice today, I made it through all the postures. Without gasping, gurgling or groaning, even.
Huh. Could it be? Maybe I really am getting stronger.
Day 18 Never Too Late
“Never too sick, never too old, never too broken … to begin again.”
That’s the slogan at my yoga studio. Labouring, as I am, through the murk of a full-blown mid-life crisis, I find it particularly encouraging. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. I look so stable. Normal, even. Well, beneath my mild-mannered exterior pulses the hot, red knowledge of mortality, the running-out of the sand in my hourglass. Like Superman, but with neuroses instead of power.
I look after myself. I’m responsible, vigilant even, some might suggest hypochondriacal, about my health. (I want “I TOLD you I was sick!” carved on my headstone.) I don’t obsess, really, but I pay attention. Just because I didn’t have (fill in the blank) last year, when I complained about that weird pain in my (fill in the blank) doesn’t mean I don’t have it now.
I’m not sick, but some days, I feel old and broken in ways that there simply isn’t time to fix. My life is changing, once more, and I’ve never been particularly good with change. But that’s what life is. Like it or not, it’s all about change.
So I push myself out of my comfort zone, day after day, trying to get my head to my knee, forcing myself to face my aging body, my changing life. It’s hard. Sometimes it hurts.
As Westley said to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” (Westley was sad when he said that, suffering as he was under the burden of unrequited love, and I’m quite sure he’d adopted a more optimistic outlook by the movie’s end.) Unrequited love or midlife crisis, it’s all temporary. It’ll all change soon.
It’s a good body. It’s a good life. It’s up to me to enjoy them while I can.
Namaste.