Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Yoga and Mountain Biking in Boston


Friends, it's been about 6 weeks and I'm still not running. I know. Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, yada yada yada, BLERG. Don't even get me started. But I promise to keep this post on the positive side and talk about all the fun things I've been doing instead!

The Fells!

Mountain Biking


I've been biking a lot this past month. I live next to a bike path, I ride to and from school (and everywhere else I need to go), and exercise! I need it! The out-and-back to Bedford on the Minuteman Trail is getting old, but it's a solid 22 miles with minimum traffic that requires very little thought on my part. However, this weekend I changed things up a bit...

After a Saturday morning of homework I was ready for a break, so I hopped on my bike and peddled away, with no exercise objective in mind other than movement. I meandered around Medford and found my way to The Fells, a mid-suburb wilderiness(ish) area I had heard of but, until Saturday, never seen.

Route details on MapMyRun.

Trails! Oh fun! My rambling ride quickly turned into a mountain biking (mis)advenure. In case you're wondering, no, I do not actually "know" how to mountain bike...but I bike a lot and I'm experienced at throwing myself down dangerous hills (refer back to my ski racing days), so I winged it reasonably well. It was fun! I need more adrenaline in my homework-heavy life...


I say mis-adventure because after about a half-hour it sunk in that mountain biking alone on a hybrid bike is probably not a thing an inexperienced person should do. So I continued my meander through Medford. But I will be going back to The Fells!

Yoga


I have been yoga-ing HARD. I no longer do Bikram, but I joined a rock gym here in Somerville, and they offer yoga classes every day! I do vinyasa, power yoga, yoga for climbers -- basically whatever class I can work into my schedule.

I'm not a "yoga person" (you know what I mean), and I have never been super-good at it. But I am generally strong, and usually on the stronger side of people in your average yoga class. Well, not anymore! Let me tell you, yoga at a rock gym, with every class full of core-strong upper-body fit rock climbers, is a different game entirely! Woah dang people are strong!

Going to 2-4 classes a week does really make a difference. I can now do a lot of push-ups -- the kind with your elbows tucked in -- and about three seconds of crow. I can do one-armed vinyasas, and I don't even want to know how long of plank. I can hang out in chair pose for a while, and I can actually do a class-full of downward dog and still be able to lift my arms the next day.

This is not me. Obviously. I aspire to someday
look this good while doing yoga.

Though I feel incredibly unfit due to not running, I don't think I've ever been so all-body strong. Hooray for my core? This will probably be good whenever I actually start running again. And while I have no aspirations of becoming a yoga-master (let's be real, in an ideal world I'd be running every day and going to just one or two classes a week), for now I am learning to enjoy it!