Are You Living It?

Sundays this fall, I’ve been teaching yoga to the Carolina Tar Heels football team. Each class is full of interesting moments—like the time the entire defensive line (average weight: 302 pounds) challenged one of the players to back his claim that he could do a full split, or the time another player went straight from crane to handstand, just after I’d claimed, “This pose is about balance, not upper-body strength,” or the time my suggestion “You might rest your fingers on your chest so you can feel your ribs” was greeted with chuckles and a good-natured call of ”Maybe you can feel your ribs.” 

This weekend, I traveled with my running group to Richmond. Some of us ran the 8K, some the half marathon, some the full marathon. It was brutal weather: storms overnight, weird barometric pressure, 30 mph gusts, and eventually sunshine to warm the humid air to 70 degrees. Almost everyone overheated over 26.2 miles. But they all finished, which is quite an accomplishment in itself.

The night before Saturday’s race, I walked my athletes through the complicated logistics of the day, from what to put in which bags to where to turn to what to expect out on the run course. The last turn of the course, 50 yards from the finish, was onto grass, and just after the turn there were a number of thick roots sticking from the dirt like the backs of thick sea creatures emerging from the water. I told folks that toward the end of the race, they’d get tunnel vision, with the area of their focus shrinking further and further until it was very narrow. The end of the tunnel is the finish line, and when you can literally see the finish, you aren’t looking at the rooty ground under your feet. I passed through the tunnel in April: it was wide in Hopkinton and narrowed over 26 miles so that it obscured all of Boylston Street.

A quick report from the beach, where five of my clients did the Beach2Battleship half-iron race and another, Marne, ran the anchor leg of a mixed relay (3rd place). What a great race, and a beautiful day to enjoy it. The current swept us to a quick swim; the bike was flattish; the run was scenic.

There’s a nice introduction for athletes on how to get into yoga—appropriate for both women and men—in November’s issue of Her Sports magazine. (Apparently, it’s also the last issue under the Her Sports name; the periodical has been rebranded as Women’s Running.) It’s also available online here.

Those of you with Carolina ties who’ll be in Chapel Hill on November 15 should consider running the Eve Carson Memorial 5K, which starts at the reasonable hour of 10:00 a.m. on the beautiful Carolina campus that Eve loved so much.

This week in my yoga classes for athletes, we’re working moon salutations. You’ll find many different flows labeled moon salutations—I don’t claim that this is the original, the only, or the “right” way to do them; it’s just a great routine for athletes, especially those who are still a few weeks from their peak fall competitions (such as runners prepping for a fall/early winter marathon). I learned this sequence from a handout I received in teacher training, and from a version taught by my colleague Ann Archer, and I’ve put a few spins on it for symmetry.

I spent a very busy day (with major gratitude for my wonderful husband) working. All morning, I worked on my athletes’ training plans. At 1:30, I met the Carolina football team for recovery yoga; at 3:00, I led a two-hour clinic for the Ramblin’ Rose women’s only triathlon to be held next weekend. While posting to my Twitter page, I realized that not only does the yang of working with the football team (in their locker room, no less, as hypermasculine an environment as I’ve ever been in) balance with the yin of working with a group of rookie triathletes. There’s also the yin of yoga versus the yang of triathlon. So the balance was in place: the heat of football is tempered by the cool of yoga; the silver light of women trying a new thing is toned by the golden light of physical exertion.

Here’s the nice e-flyer my publisher created to promote my workshop in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, October 18. There may still be a few spaces left—I hope to see you there.

Here are the participants in last weekend’s yoga and running retreat at ZAP Fitness near Blowing Rock, NC. What a perfect weekend we had: we enjoyed yoga nidra, a long run, a long afternoon of practice, a yin yoga session combined with a book discussion, a recovery run with yoga included, great food, and wonderful company.