Yoga and Cake

There are moments in life when you ask yourself questions. I had such a moment today when I was doing my best hot damp slug impression in Bikram Yoga. The question was ‘Why am I here?’ and it wasn’t one of those philosophical soul-searching moments, more of a ‘What’s really so wrong with slobbing about, anyhow?’ type things.

I doubt any of the super-bendy contortionists at the front of the room were thinking similar thoughts. I suspect they were At One with themselves (and the mirror.) This is probably where I am going wrong. I’m just not Zen enough - although it’s hard to be Zen and At One when sweating bare feet waft a perilous inch from your nose. Even harder when the person in front kicks their leg up and you can see what only their ever-loving partner should. Shorts that fit, now there's an invention. It’s not like you can close your eyes either, as you have to keep them open ‘so your energy stays in the room’. I don’t know where my energy goes, but I suspect it gambols down the front in amazement at the stretchy ones; it certainly doesn’t stay with me.

That said; I did come out of class feeling full of good intentions, and decided to go home via a different train route in order to finish the day with a three-mile walk. Sounds good, huh? Angelic, almost? I thought so too, and let me tell you it was just sheer coincidence that this route also includes my favourite tea-shop which sells cupcakes. I know! What are the chances, eh? You can’t let opportunities like this slide, so pretty soon I was safely ensconced inside, notebook open, pen at the ready, ready to rock the Mad Person Writing in Public look.


I’d just got to the part where you catch yourself mouthing part of the dialogue (never a good look when sat by yourself) when this poem came out of nowhere, plonked itself down and said ‘Are you writing me or what?’ So instead of working further on the short story, I spent the remainder of time happily scribbling a rhyme. Sometimes that’s just the way writing goes.

And in case you are wondering what the big surge of exercise is all about – take a look at this:


There may be a holiday on the horizon. *grins*

Splat-a-Soup

The month-long seclusion in a friend’s parents house would be ideal for writing, were it not for the following things:

1. Work
2. Extra hour /faff time added to commute either way to allow for strangely snowy vista
3. Stupidly signing up for another month of Bikram Yoga torture
4. Looming Tax Return
5. Preoccupation with making soup

Work

I am fortunate enough to have a job I enjoy, for a company I like, alongside folk who are nice to work with. I do realise how extraordinary that is! I do hug the nice job (metaphorically speaking) every opportunity I can. This week saw the successful launch of something I have designed/been working on pretty much ever since I arrived here eight months ago, so as you can imagine it has been a busy start to 2010. Not much time and energy left over in the evenings to write, but the balance should go back to normal now.

Extra hour / faff time

What is it with overground trains in this country, and weather? Do they build trains with nervous dispositions? Signal failures, unannounced delays, and cancellations – the slightest hint of white in the sky seems to guarantee commuter mayhem. Stoically we stand on the platforms and wait, and wait, scalding tongues on too-hot station coffee, and breathing mist into the cold morning air. Several rammed, steamy train rides later and people emerge in offices like survivors who have braved a dangerous journey - red-nosed and grinning, unwinding scarves and stamping Wellingtons.

Bendy torture

I do love Bikram Yoga. I do, honest. It’s just that Bikram Yoga doesn’t especially like me. Maybe I am just not cut out to be one of the zen-like people that sit in calm contemplation in class. This is no doubt due to the way I arrive, a whirl-wind of scarves and bags, fresh from spending forty minutes cursing the slow Metropolitan line. I then have to throw everything off, hurry into my shorts and top, fling everything into one of the only lockers left (either the very top row or very bottom), and then dash into the sauna to grab a mat and throw it on the ground. Then class begins! No wonder I don’t feel very zen. I am beginning to suspect those calm contemplative folk don’t actually work for a living.

Tax Hades

This has to be done as I was still self-employed for some of the last tax year, but I hate doing this with a complete passion. I am just really thick with maths. No matter how much I stare, tap calculators, pencil figures and frown at forms I inevitably end up in a mess. Hence doing the worse thing possible and leaving it to the last few weeks… but those official brown envelope reminders are starting to scare me, so it has to be done.

Splat-a-Soup

Leave me alone and unaided in a kitchen, and something strange happens to me. I start to imagine I am the new Delia Smith of soup-making. Saucepans will clatter down from on high, knives will be wielded, vegetables will be sliced and diced. Sometimes a commentary will be given to the sink, or the cat. I will not follow recipes – pah to recipes! And hence I will create a splat. Tasty splats granted, but still not the sort of thing you’d serve someone else if you want them to come back. More work needed, I feel.

Despite such diversions, I’ve made it to chapter 13 of the redraft. Whoo! And hello to new followers - thank you for investing time in this blog! You are very welcome.

I am a limp noodle

As you may have guessed from the title, I went to Bikram Yoga again tonight. I have been very bad the last month, and instead scurried home every potential yoga night on the grounds that it was ‘too hot’. Since Bikram Yoga is done in fixed sauna-like temperatures, it doesn’t matter a cooked fig whether it is a sunny day out there, as I knew full well even when making excuses to myself. I just wanted to eat naughty food and flop around the house watching TV.

Sadly there is a downside of naughty food and flopping, and it was with a heavy heart that the heavier me stomped off the tube at Portland Place to haul myself into yoga. It didn’t help that I had five minutes to throw myself out of my work clothes and into what passes for my yoga outfit - I aspire to one day have an outfit that matches from Sweaty Betty. Until then, I slink into the hot room in a pair of sport shorts I bought in the early 1990s and a vest that was my mum’s. I never really think these things through.

The first hurdle was the fact that the 6pm class is packed. It is always packed, and if you get there too close to the start then the only spaces left will be for the super bendy at the front. I am scared of the front row. They all sit with zen-like calm concentration reflected back at them from the front mirrors, yet at the drop of a head-band they will all twist into yoga contortions last seen when I twisted my Sindy doll the wrong way. Luckily I avoided the front row, but the only space was in the second row, which is just as bad. People expect the second row to be at least able to do the full series of postures without collapsing into a heap on their mat. I took my place, fearing that people might be rather disappointed with me.

The first series of postures are fifty minutes of standing exercises, and by posture three I am feeling rather good. I can twist, I can bend, I can crouch low down, I can balance on my toes. Go me! And then it all goes horribly wrong. Everything aches – I can feel every single one of the missed classes. Why doesn’t my body remember and snap back into shape like an elastic band? Why do my arms sag? Why has my hair gone into a frizzy enormous halo yet everyone else’s looks sleek and normal? Why am I here when I could be lolling around at home eating chocolate? Why for the love of God why?

By the time we get to the forty minutes of floor postures I am as weak as a cooked piece of spaghetti. By now my main challenge is staying in the room and not running for cool freedom. If I at least stay in the room then I have achieved something, even if I haven’t managed to do all the postures. And so I stay, dripping sweat, and feeling once again as lively as a hot damp slug. As soon as we are released I stagger out, and have to sit outside for a while before I attempt the crush at the showers. I am so flummoxed by the fact I have forced myself into exercise that I almost lose my locker key, forget my water bottle and put my top on the wrong way around. Also why is it that after yoga none of my clothes will fit when I try and put them on again? I force my fat self into my work outfit, which someone has sneakily swapped for a size 8 in my absence, and then slap out of yoga with the usual shell-shocked expression and wild hair.

I get the feeling that the love affair may sadly be over! But I will go again tomorrow just to see... the second class of the week usually goes a lot better than the first. And aching is good, isn't it? Tomorrow I'll probably wake up all refreshed... *flops into bed*

Bikram Yoga

Earlier this year while in Manchester, I was introduced to Bikram Yoga. This is pretty much yoga done in a sauna - you burn a shed-load of calories, sweat drips off every limb, and by the time you get to the floor postures you feel pretty much like how I’d imagine a hot exhausted slug would feel on being asked to do sit ups. But the strange thing is I like it.

I’m not a natural exercise person, I’ve decided. I’m more a natural chocolate sort of person, more a let’s sit down and read a nice book rather than throw frantic shapes person. Yet sporadically over the years I have, like most people, tried out an exercise or two.

Gymnastics was my first and true love in the exercise world. I went to a weekly class after school for eight years; I was a whiz at the asymmetric bars, not so bad on the floor, and looked like ‘a dying duck in a thunderstorm’ on the beam, according to the sadistic gym teacher. Several migraines later, I sadly said goodbye.

After gymnastics came swimming – via lessons at school. Once a week we would eagerly be herded into a coach and taken to the local swimming baths. We used to navigate around the suspiciously warm splash pool for our feet, and then plunge into the water, yelling. Not quite sure why it was customary to yell but the rest of the lesson would be spent splashing first one way, and then the other, around and around the pool. They’d also be the intolerable wait shivering at the side of the pool while the teacher demonstrated something like the correct use of a float (held with arms out straight, not as a shield/weapon against another pupil). Woe betides your mother dressing you in tights when you had to wriggle out of your wet costume back into your school clothes. We had all perfected the art of getting showered and changed in one minute flat – needless to say the coach trip back to school was full of soggy small people.

I first joined a gym when I was 15 – mainly because you could smoke in the tiny café area and drink milkshakes – both perfect things to do pre-work out. Needless to say I wasn’t quite into the ‘gym’ thing, although I liked the posters from Athena covering the walls.

At University I tried to take up jogging but swiftly decided it wasn’t for me. I liked the idea of it, but barely travelled the length between lampposts before I had to stop, wheezing. I’ve never lived anywhere nice enough to warrant a jog anyway – around the block usually involves a motorway. Also people running around here tend to look like they have just been involved in something dodgy. And so it was back to very sporadic gym visits – where you’d pay by the month, listen to bad techno over the intercom, and wish you were somewhere else.

And then I discovered yoga (cue some sort of harp music).

My first yoga lessons were in a tiny church hall in Tottenham. The teacher used to come in with her cassette recorder, fuss with it for ten minutes and then fill the room with tinny whale song. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts, but surprisingly I stuck with it.

I think it appealed as it takes the flexibility of gymnastics, mixes in a bit of meditation and has an instant ‘feel good’ factor when you leave a class. So from then on I left the gym behind and began sporadically attending yoga lessons instead. Over the years I found nicer classes – usually tucked into community halls, where you’d do postures under a framed picture of the Queen. I liked it, but wanted more…

And then a friend introduced me to Bikram. Now this is extreme yoga – and one of hardest work outs I have ever done. But it is amazing! Even if I feel like a hot slug most of the time. I have now signed up until October, and as it is not cheap, I have to go twice a week to make it worth my while. That is a huge commitment for me, but I think it makes me feel more positive; I sleep better, and therefore feel better (as too knackered for pontificating). This is all good! And it means I can stir Cadbury’s chocolate buttons into my morning porridge with no remorse at all.