The Grunting Mysteries Of The East

Yesterday afternoon after exhausting monster, careerbuilder and craigslist of all they had to offer, I went out for a jog.

It was about five o'clock. The sky had been grey all afternoon and there was an edge to the air but as I walked along the street towards the river the wind was refreshing rather than icy, and the lights of the stores were starting to come on.

As I got to the running track I started off at a medium pace and kept it up for a couple of laps. At this point it's nice to have Krissa come in and keep the pace down for her mile or so. This may sound patronising, but it really isn't - her legs are shorter than mine. I managed to regulate myself and run pretty gently for a mile and three quarters (or 2800m, for those playing along at home with a slide rule) and then cranked the speed up again. The lights of Manhattan were coming on across the river and on the final lap I got three quarters of the way around and stepped up to a loping run, a real run, not jogging, and it felt really, really good to curl around the bend going fast to come into the end of a two mile run and know I could keep going.

'I could get into this fitness lark,' I thought to myself on the way home.

This morning Krissa and I got up a little earlier than usual. Something about the last few mornings has lead me to be really, really reticent to stick my bonce out of the covers into the light of day. I've no idea what it is - it's not as cold as it was, but hey, maybe I have an intermittent grumpylazy gene. All I know is that I am simultaneously at my most grumpy and witty in those five/ten/fifteen/thirty minutes between waking up and actually getting out of bed.

We were getting up early to do yoga.
I figure that yoga is for thin bendy people. Flexible. Rubber boned. People who are philosophical towards the higher things in life, like measured and even breathing, the infinite, chiropractor bills. Things like that.
It was precisely this rationale which lead me to give it a go, because, well, why not?

The video, picked up in a fit of enthusiasm after Tuesday's Weight Watcher's meeting, touted a twenty minute workout, which anyone could fit into their day.
Hurrah!

This morning I found out what it was like to try yoga while conspicuously not being thin and bendy.
And the answer is: grunty.
Now I can do push ups, although I'd appreciate it if you didn't ask me to prove this in public, so I was able to do the sequence which seemed to be a very slow, yoga-fied burpee.

Starting in the upper bit of a push-up, you drop slowishly to the ground, and then lift your upper body up into 'The Cobra' which reminds me of how a Terminator might move around if you chopped its legs off, down again, and then back into the 'Downward Facing Dog' which reminds me of Douglas Bader attempting to stand up after landing on his face after being shot down in Nazi Germany....sort of.

And that was the bit I could do, and it appeared mercifully regularly, leading me gently and repeatedly away from the apparent conclusion that I am a completely malco-ordinated lump who can't use his limbs properly.

While Krissa, on the other side of the living room, gracefully extended her hand above her head with a soft theatrical sweeping turn of the palm, I was slowly tottering over whilst trying not to knock the candles over on the coffee table, and receiving a not insignificant amount of hate mail from my leg muscles in the process.

At the end of the twenty minutes, when I was unintentionally splayed out on the carpet, the annoyingly sinuous woman on the television slid oilily into the lotus position and encouraged Krissa and I to sit cross legged and do holding-a-captive-hamster style hand movements to, and I quote, "Seal in the benefits of the exercise."

I interpreted this my own way and staggered off to make a cup of tea.

Namaste, indeed.