November Yoga

Big news in my workout world. 

A couple months ago, a friend and I both bought a one-month Bikram yoga groupon.  We planned to start originally in September when I got back from my now sister-in-law's bachelorette party, but something came up.  Then we were going to start right when I got back from my brother's wedding a couple weeks ago, but in that month in between, my friend started having major knee problems and decided she wasn't going to be able to run the half in San Antonio in 10 days and she actually had surgery a couple weeks ago to repair her miniscus, which was torn.  So she's now planning to start her one month in mid-November, but I didn't want to wait that long, so I started mine last night.

I am hoping that it will help me build some strength and flexibility in the next week and a half before my marathon.  I am hoping it will help me with heat acclimation in case I have a hot marathon day on November 13.  I am hoping it will help me beyond my race with calming my mind and relaxing myself, maybe going to a deeper level.

And honestly, I'm also hoping it will help me to drop a few pounds before the race.  I've written before about how I gained some weight this spring after I ran Boston and we went to Italy for vacation for a couple weeks.  The combo of eating tons and not doing intense training meant I packed on a few.  And then I got back to reality, and the pounds just kind of stayed.  It's been driving me crazy.  I generally eat pretty healthy foods, but even when I'm only at about 30 miles per week, I seem to be fairly ravenous a lot of the time and I justify treat foods by thinking about how many miles I ran or something.  Either way, the pounds have stayed, and there was some cool statistic in Runner's World several years ago about how many seconds per mile in a marathon each pound costs you.  I wish I could find it again...

I've done Bikram Yoga a couple times before, but never very often.  I went with several friends probably 7 or 8 years ago several times.  But then I had a bad experience.  We were all out one night and planned to go to yoga in the morning.  I was drinking and they thought there was no way I'd go.  But I don't break plans that I've made if it's at all humanly possible to keep them, so I showed up for yoga in the morning.  Hung over.  Reeking of alcohol apparently.  And of course, within half an hour, it was all coming back up.  It was awful.  And then I didn't go back for a long time.  Adam was in town visiting me about 4-5 years ago and we went to 3 classes in a row, but that was it.  And I guess I went to a single class last year on Labor Day weekend. 

But I bought the groupon, and here we go. 

It's a huge change in my schedule, since I'll still keep working out in the morning.  It's just going to mean not much of a social life at night.  They recommend you go as often as possible for 10 days to 2 weeks.  So I went last night, will plan to go tonight, skipping Thurs, then I'll try to go Fri-Wed each day, skip Thurs again, and then maybe go next Fri, skip Sat and Sun (out of town for the marathon), then just see how I feel when I get back to town after the race. 

But seriously, it's going to be very time-consuming and necessitate a major schedule shift for the month.  Each class is 90 minutes.  That's the class.  There's also getting dressed, getting there early enough to get parked and get a space in the room, and of course getting some clothes on afterward, getting home, and showering.  The room for the class is heated (maybe air conditioned in the summer!) to 105 degrees.  So while occasionally if I take it easy at boot camp, I can get by without a shower, or without washing my hair, I was completely soaked after the class last night and not showering was not an option.  So if I go to class 5-6 times per week as I plan (skipping Thursdays for sure, maybe one other day as needed), that's 7.5-9 hours of exercise in class, plus about at least 5-6 more hours of getting ready and cleaning up, that means that basically I've said for the month of November, I need to find about 12-15 hours of free time per week to do this.  Wow.  It will be a combination of trying to shorten my days at work a little and spending less time at home in the evenings.  I warned hubby this was coming, but I can already tell it will be hard to see him less.  But we can do anything for a month -- and maybe I can convince him to try a class with me at some point! 

This is going to put my actual workout time at about 17 hours per week -- insane!  Well, insane for me, I know lots of people work out more than that, but that's way more than I currently do.  I have 3 hours a week of bootcamp, about 3 hours of weekday running, and about 3 hours of weekend running, and now let's call it 8 hours a week of yoga.  Holy cow!  And that's still keeping my mileage and number of running days reduced, trying to avoid any calf probs before the race.  Imagine if I were following my full running schedule -- I'd be close to 20 hours a week of exercise time! 

I noticed I was hungry after class last night when I got home, but not a lot of stuff sounded good to me.  What I really wanted was a big salad, but I was too tired when I got home to make one.  Instead I heated up some leftover spinach-artichoke dip and spread it on an English muffin.  Once it gets to be the weekend, maybe I'll try to prepare some salad stuff in advance for dinners next week when I get home. 

So between a decreased appetite, being alcohol free for the next couple weeks, and adding about 90 minutes more of activity most days of the week, I'm hoping to lose a few pounds before next week Sunday, meaning less @ss to drag 26.2 miles over San Antonio...  Let's hope this works!  It will be fun, and quite consuming, to try. 

The first class last night was pretty good.  Of the 26 postures, there were a couple where the instructor must have seen enough of a lack of flexibility to ask me afterward if I was a runner.  That's not a compliment in yoga!  It just means I'm insanely inflexible and tight on the bottom half of my body -- so inflexible that it was apparent to the instructor despite there being about 35 other people in the class.  Ooops.  The heat didn't bother me too much though -- I'm always very well-hydrated, and I think I like being warm more than some people do.  I managed to do the whole class (though like I said, sometimes I couldn't do the whole pose -- for example, there's one where you stand on one leg, interlace your fingers under the other foot (knee to chest), and then you kick that foot forward -- uh, no.  I just stood there trying to balance on the one leg while holding the other, but no kicking).  I noticed a couple other first-timers and some who may be veterans who had to sit down at various times during the class and missed some of the poses, but I didn't have to do that at any point.  I didn't see anyone wearing a watch, but I really wish I'd been able to wear my heart rate monitor.  Just so curious to see what kind of numbers I'd be getting. 

So here we go.  Wonder what I'll say about it on December 1!