After Atalanta

I went to yoga for the first time in a long while on Saturday. I have been through various phases in my fitness life some of which have included a lot of yoga. For example, when I was in school in Iowa I would go several times a week. In part because I liked building flexible strength and in part because I really needed those last five minutes of class in corpse pose where I imagined the faces of my advisors on apples that gently fell to the ground and rolled away. But that was pretty much as meditative as I ever got. No offense to all the yogis out there, but I just never got into all the Eastern philosophy. So I seek out classes that do not include this as a huge component. The class on Saturday fit this particular bill. It lacked a little bit of the athleticism I am used to, but my calves didn't care because they have been tight on the verge of snapping and thus anything was going to help improve that situation. Unfortunately my instructor probably wasn't as concerned about...

[NOTE: I am not making fun of Canadians here. I happen to love the “eh” that comes at the end of their sentences. I find it much more appealing than Americans’ “huh” or “whatever.”] The other morning in my Vancouver hotel room I was surfing through the channels. It was very early and a Sunday so I wasn’t expecting to find too much. What I did find was a lot of yoga instruction. The first show I saw seemed typical to others I have seen on television or DVD. An instructor doing the poses and two others following. She stressed going at one’s own level and the “followers” exemplified this through their abilities to reach various stages in the poses, though they both seemed to be regular practitioners. I thought it was a good demonstration of individuals’ limits no matter their level of practice. So kudos to that program. But I was not really in the mood to practice or watch yoga so I kept flipping. It was then that I came across a very different type of yoga program. This one also had thre...