Mental Workouts

This post has been broken into 3 parts to make the skimming easier. The first part is bitching, the second part is kind of heavy, and the third part is more lighthearted and (I hope) humorous.

I’m still sad, sad, sad, but underneath it all there’s something bubbling up inside that’s mad, mad, mad. In the back of my mind there’s a little voice growing that’s saying, “How dare she! After everything that I did for her!” My inner monologue is slowly moving from a constant whine of I can’t! to something between a diatribe and a plea (as if bitching someone out ever made them see the light and come back to you).

How could you do this to someone that you supposedly care about?! I hiss at the Grease Monkey in my head that is seated on a straight-back chair under a bare bulb. First you treat me like shit for a month, not because of anything I did, but because you can’t deal with the stresses in your own life. You move to a different house (which you couldn’t do without me), you get all your nice things out of storage, and then you uncategorically cut me out of your life when you no longer have use for me. Do you think that you have no responsibilities to think about my feelings? You think that this is the best for both of us?? Did you honestly think that no one would get hurt? Why don't you take some fucking responsibility for once? You say you need time and space; I can give you time and space. But why do you have to dump me to do it? Why, after all this time of me being the stable one emotionally and constantly picking up the pieces of your wreck of a life, compensating for your disastrous time management skills, why do I now have to bear the burden again of your poor emotional management?

And on it goes like that. While I’m at it, I bring up all my other grievances: how everything had to be on her schedule, how I was always the one who was saving money and paying for things when she ran out while she squirreled money away bolstering her savings and reducing her debt (and then she calls me financially irresponsible!), how I feed and walk her dog and she is still disdainful of my cat, how I never made fun of her for not knowing what words mean or that China and Japan are different countries but she treats me like an idiot for not knowing how to properly clean a cast iron pan… This last one opens the door for me to list all of her little flaws. And I could go on forever like that, but I try not to dwell on it.

In the five stages of grief, I first hit denial, then I piled bargaining on top of that. Depression set in really quick, and now I’m moving in to anger. I’ve only got one step left and that’s acceptance. I really, really, really don’t want to hit acceptance. I don’t want to let go. I’ve lost a lot in the last year: my independence, a lot of athletic drive, contact with friends, a feeling of being connected with my emotions, and a lot (a lot) of money. I want that life back, but I want that life with her in it. Is that too much to ask?

Spiritual Revelation... Almost

This whole situation has lead to a kind of spiritual crisis. As everything in my life feels like it’s spinning out of my control, I’ve needed some kind of Higher Power to believe in. A friend of Shane’s picked Jessica Biel to be her AA Higher Power because she didn’t believe in God and Jessica Biel is hot and wholesome. Jessica Biel, as hot and wholesome as she may be, wasn’t going to do it for me. I would say that I’m spiritual, but I don’t believe in God in any Judeo-Christian way. I was trying the whole “ask the Universe” visualization thing, but my whole world was too black for me to be able to envision a better world. So then I turned to astrology. At least checking daily horoscopes I had some sort of indication of what to expect and how I should act on any given day. Who cared if it actually worked, I just needed some sort of daily guidance. So I googled “horoscope,” found one that most seemed to understand my situation at the moment, and bookmarked it. I've been checking both Taurus (me) and Gemini (her) every day.

But then something else happened, I was back in crisis, and the horoscopes didn’t offer me anyOne to appeal to. If I wrote a letter to Jessica Biel, I didn't think she'd be able to fix it. I actually sat there and prayed. I don’t know how to pray, so I just sat there and said what was on my mind, adding “, God” in there every now and then for good measure. I asked one of the gym regulars who was off to daily mass to pray for me as well because I figured he’d be better at it. God knows what's up, and I didn't promise Him anything, but knowing that I had my bases covered made me feel a bit better.

But I doubt that going to church or checking my horoscope is going to provide the rock that I (Claire, not people in general, just me) am going to need to get me through. Normally that thing has been working out and riding my bike, but since that just isn’t working I need to add something to my repertoire. (Mindy has pointed out that a sign of depression—the fourth stage of grief—is not enjoying things that you usually enjoy, so maybe it’ll come back.) I need something that will help me grow mentally, but also make me feel like I’m doing something, because Claires don’t just think about things, they need action.

Some Serious Yoga

So with all that in mind, last night I coughed up $15 that I really didn’t have to go to a real yoga studio for a hot yoga class. I’ve done YMCA yoga on and off for a couple of years now, but I needed the kind of hippie-dippie teacher with a whole wardrobe of yoga clothes, who does things like week-long yoga retreats and shavasana to live music, in real estate dedicated solely to yoga to give me the spiritual and flexibility guidance that I was looking for. I chose hot yoga not to sweat more (there is no shortage of sweat in my life), but because it seemed like the kind of class that the real yogis would go to.

My first surprise came when before the class the teacher was lamenting the flooding in her basement (everything flooded in Massachusetts this week). For some reason, I thought that a yoga teacher should be serene and positive in the face of acts of God, and not say the word “shit,” even if her basement was flooded. Once I realized that this woman was the teacher, I got slightly disappointed again. I have this image of serious yogis eating an all-natural diet and having limber, supple, sinewy bodies. This woman was.. well... doughy.

Another thing I expected in my $15 professional yoga class was some serious chanting and sitar jams. Instead, the teacher had a playlist on her iPod that included Sheryl Crow, Jack Johnson, and REM. Actually, I really liked the music. It was all stuff that I’d had in my CD collection, but it wasn’t putting me in touch with the Universe and making me send warm love vibes to my colon. In fact, there was no meditation component to the class at all, except maybe a story from this month’s Yoga Journal about a woman who went to her first yoga class in cowboy boots and skinny jeans after eating a calzone, and how we should appreciate the ah-hah moments we should get through yoga. We didn’t work on breathing at all, which is fine, because that’s the part where I hyperventilate. Still, I felt like I should do all the things I suck at in this expensive class.

There are a bunch of yoga studios in the area, so I'm going to keep shopping around for a teacher/class that I like. I haven't given up on yoga yet.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the class. I sweat like a rain cloud, remembered some songs that I’d like to add to my iTunes, and chuckled a few times at the teacher’s curse-laiden calzone stories. I got in lots of stretching and some core work. We didn’t do boat pose, so I felt like a semi-competent yogi doing the chataranga and warrior III without falling on my face.

Best of all, though, I had dressed how I thought that serious Bikram yogis would dress. I wore a pair of tight running shorts and a sports bra. When I walked in, everyone was fully clothed but me. Oh well, I’ve lived in Europe, I’m used to being naked in public, so the floor-to-ceiling windows out to the parking lot didn’t bother me. Standing there in my underwear under the dim yoga light I looked at my reflection as I reached for the sky and exhaled deeply. And there… clear enough for me to see them fifteen feet away were my six-pack muscles!

As everybody knows, a washboard stomach is the key to happiness. Anyone with defined abdominal muscles has a happy and fulfilling life (I think that’s in the Bible somewhere). So perhaps everything’s going to work out after all.

Rants: Yoga and Your Useless Fat Ass Is Your Own Damned Fault!

I think that perhaps I may be in a bad mood. Either that or I'm just having a bad day. Either way, I'm annoyed at the world. I'll start with the second one first.

On Saturday I did a weights session followed by a long-ish, fast-ish run, and as a result my hamstrings (thank you straight-leg deadlifts), lats and rhomboids (thanks pullups), and pecs (thanks pushups) have been fucked up all week. Not injured, just tight and sore. I am not flexible to begin with, especially not in my neck and shoulders. I have that rounded-forward shoulder, winged scapulae thing. Kyphosis? Typhoid? Whatever it's called. I try to care, but I really, really, really don't. Nothing you can say can change my mind about that, so quit interrupting. I'm trying to tell a story.

So I go to yoga this morning to try to address the aforementioned problems in my back, chest, and legs. I do not enjoy yoga, I go because it is good for me. I also do not like the teacher. She is one of those people who fancies herself a serious triathlete, but skips 90% of her workouts. And yet she still makes excuses, like we care, or that we haven't noticed when she never shows up to swimming. When she comes to swimming, she will sit out 50 yards out of every 100 to catch her breath, but she refuses to move down to the slow lane. She loves to talk about the marathon she ran (I think it was Chicago in something like 1855), but I have heard her speak of ONE actual run that she's gone on in the year I've been going to her class. After that ONE run, she complained of being sore for a week.

But she thinks she knows everything there is to know about anything. After I ran the Boston Marathon she asked me what my time was. I told her it was just under 4:15. "What was your time?" asked one of the swimmers in the class, Susan. We like Susan, she just hadn't heard me. The World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga teacher answered for me, "4:50, anything under 5 hours is good." I didn't run a 4:50!!!!! But for some reason I didn't correct her. It seemed like it would be rude, since she does know everything after all. But it annoyed me.

I must have told her in February or March that I was training for an ironman. "You mean a half ironman?" she asked. Noooo, why would I say 'ironman' when I meant half ironman. Either you think I'm stupid or you think I'm a liar. I don't appreciate either one. Then, some time in the spring she asked me again if I was training for anything. "My big race is my ironman in August," I said. "Is it a half ironman?" she asked. Noooooo, it's STILL a full ironman. Before I left for California at the end of July she asked me what I was going for. "My ironman," I said. "Oh, is it a half ironman?" Noooooo, still a full fucking ironman! Once I can understand, maybe she just didn't hear me. But three times?!

And she says the names of stuff wrong. Granted, she's French, and I of all people shouldn't be criticizing anyone of knot knowing obscure plurals and rare eccentricities of one's second language, but she makes these mistakes in every class, and in every class they annoy me, second language or not. She calls vertebrae (plural of vertebra) "vertebras." She calls scapulae (plural of scapula) "scapulas." She calls your pelvis (noun) your "pelvic." She uses "foot" for both singular and plural, same with "shoulder" and "buttocks." And she calls your plantar fascia your "plantar fasciitis," as in "We are going to stretch your plantar fasciitis." If you don't know, plantar fasciitis is inflamation of the plantar fasciia. You cannot stretch inflamation.

So today, as I mentioned, I was stiff and sore. I'm not usually a very flexible person, but today I was in especially rough shape. That's why I go to yoga! We're warming up, doing our breathing thing (I have to cheat, I don't know how other people can breathe in for 15 straight seconds without suffocating), when she comes up behind me and tries to roll my shoulders back. I have the forward-rolling shoulder problem, I know. I don't care. I usually let her roll them back and I hold them as best I can. But today the woman was trying to break some bones. I was trying to be zen about it and ignore her, letting her reshape me without affecting my chi. You know, flowing with the river... But then she whispers, "You want to roll them back a little farther." At this point it feels like the points of my scapulae are about to puncture my lungs, and I physically CANNOT move my shoulders back any farther. "That's as far back as they'll go!" I whisper, and she goes back to the front of the room.

Then she comes back to correct me on pretty much every pose for the rest of the day. She corrects me more than the new people I have to either side of me: the woman who is twisting in complete WRONG direction, and the man who is doing the ocean breath so loud that I swear they can hear him all the way up on the Death Star. I know I'm not the best yogi out there, but I'm sure my form is better than some of the 50-year-old runner guys in the class. "Claire, keep that leg straight. Claire, flex your foot. Claire, you want to rotate your hip out more..." But when she asked about my jacket, I knew she was picking on me. See, it was 6º when I pulled in to the Y parking lot this morning. So I was wearing this warm, old, ratty fleece. I'm one of those people who's always cold, and I was still wearing my warm, ratty fleece halfway through class, because it's not like we were running or anything. I was cold. She came over and said, "Aren't you too warm in that fleece?"

"Not yet," I said. What the fuck?! Like I wouldn't be able to tell if I were too warm. Just because she's menopausal and suffering from hot flashes doesn't mean that we all are. This is yoga class, not tea in her living room. Let me zone out and feel my body dammit! Quit distracting me.

But I wasn't pissed off yet. This is just the typical yoga annoyances that I put up with every week. I'm zen, I can deal with it. This is why I do yoga, to stretch and calm down. Then, after class I sprayed down my mat, put my stuff away, and was putting my shoes back on outside the yoga studio. "Claire," said the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor, leaning out the door. "Have you been stretching after your biking and running?"

"No," I said, because it was the answer she was waiting for. In fact I do stretch... a bit. Probably every other run I'll be feeling tight and stretch for less than 5 minutes. You know, touch my toes, stretch out my calves on a stair, stand with my foot on my butt... I'm not one of the people who starts wiping down their bike in spin classes before the stretching is over. But I'm usually too cold/tired/sweaty/hungry to stay touching my toes for 20 minutes after every workout. That's why I go to yoga! And anyway, aren't modern exercise trends moving away from static stretching?

"Well you really should be stretching after you work out," the World's Most Knowledgeable Yoga Instructor told me, like I'd asked her opinion. "That's why you're so tight. Just for a few minutes before, and then more afterwards."

She CAME OUT OF THE CLASSROOM to tell me this. This is why I go to yoga!!!!! And yes, I was tight today, but it was from fucking myself up lifting too much weight. That's. why. I. come. to. her. class. at 5:30. in. the. morning. EVERY. WEEK! I come to yoga to STRETCH, you blockhead!