I love to run. My feet gently tread the roadway or the trail. My relaxed gait allows me to absorb the scenery, focus on breath, and wander my brain. Running, every time, instills a sense of peace.
I love spin class, the pounding music, my sweat dripping, the instructor shouting out drills, the camaraderie of suffering as a group. Spin, for me, includes an element of showing off. I leave class wrapped in a wet blanket of achievement.
I don’t love yoga. Yoga hurts. I restarted last week after a thirteen-year break. Early in my tenure of working for the YWCA, I slipped out of work two mornings a week to meet Susan for a seventy-five-minute class. I got pretty good at yoga. One woman in the class even said so. “You know, you’re pretty good at yoga.” My status as the only man in the room made me comment-worthy. But yoga disrupted the workday, and my boss glared at me when I returned to my office in shorts, a t-shirt and bare feet, so I quit daytime yoga. I quit all yoga.
Now I suck at yoga. My body became brittle, inflexible, tight. I strain for every pose. As I struggle with form, Steph, the instructor, says “I’m coming ’round.” She walks between the participants. I’m sure many feel an air of validation as she walks by without comment. As she passes me, I imagine her silent tch tch tch, her imperceptible head shake, her eyes rolling in her head. “Relax your shoulders, everything in line with your body.” I’m the only one she corrects.
About those shoulders. Both are wrecked: The left one rebuilt after crashing my bike into a minivan. The right one, dislocated countless times, most recently and the worst to date just eight months ago. I can’t relax my shoulders and they never line up. I align my arms and shoulders to the edge of pain and stop there. I shoot for a rough approximation of sloppy yoga form.
Two classes in two weeks. My back hasn’t felt this flexible in months. I restarted yoga because it hurt all the time. My leg and hip muscles, always tight from running and riding, pull my sacrum out of alignment. This manifests as disabling back pain. A couple of months ago, I got out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I couldn’t stand up. The pain in my back caused my legs to give out. After numerous tries, I gave up. I crawled to the bathroom.
As part of my job as the finance director of the county’s library system, I support the Friends of the Library fundraising group. We collect tens of thousands of donated books each year. We sort them, box them, and sell them at a massive book sale every July. Because most of the group is retirees, at sixty years old, I’m the youngest person associated with the organization. Everyone knows I run and bicycle in my spare time. I look fit. But I can’t lift a box of books without blowing out my back. During book sale set up, I’ll bypass a box of books that needs to be moved and let the seventy-one-year-old woman behind me pick it up.
No, I don’t love yoga, but I’m doing it. All forms of exercise can’t be as fun as running. Right now, I view yoga with the same resignation as when I gut down my daily iron pills. When I do that, I know I’ll feel sick, but suffering through low iron is far worse. I’ve put off correcting the tightness in my legs, back, and shoulders for too long. If I can regain my flexibility, maybe I’ll start to love yoga too.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
