Why Hello There, September!

Dear Friend! It's been a crazy and chaotic start to the semester, believe you me. So many (totally irrelevant and mostly uninteresting) things have been happening around these parts. I'll try to address them in blocks.

First and foremost I started bikram! It's pretty awesome. It's actually been a bit of an experience.

Last Tuesday I went in and bought a two week unlimited pass at the discounted rate for new students and committed myself to doing everything in my power to go every day for the two weeks.

Tuesday Sweet Lady J and I went for the first time. The instructor was super nice and gave us the run down on what to expect for the first day. No talking in the room, not feeling well is normal for the first few classes, don't push yourself, all that sort of stuff. He also set our mats up for us in the 'new student' corner in the back of the room.

And then he said this:

"Remember ladies, your goal for today is to just stay in the room".

And that, Dear Friend, that is when we really began to grasp exactly what it is we had gotten ourselves into.

The room was hot. Like walking into a wet wall of heat hot. You sweat almost immediately. It drips into your eyes, up your nose, fills your ears. There is no fighting it. The class consists of twenty six postures with two sets each. On day one I attempted the first half of them, and had to lie down for the second half for fear of passing out or throwing up.

In hind site, I now know that there were two big issues for me on that first day. The first was that I was pushing myself way too hard when I should have been adjusting to the heat and the flow of class. The second was that I was thinking too much about the postures and whether or not I was doing them correctly instead of making sure I was remembering to breathe normally. As a result I was out of breath, dizzy and nauseous for most of the class. But I did make it to the end of class, so that was a pretty big victory for me.

On the second day we were allowed to choose our own places in class. We got there a little later than I would have liked and so we had less places to choose from. However, there was a big open spot in the back right hand corner so that's where we set up.

This was a bad decision. More on that later.

I was still slightly nauseous from class the day before. I hadn't gotten a chance to eat all day because I was still trying to adjust to my new work/school schedule and had instead, resorted to eating bananas in the car on the way to class. In addition to this poor decision, I was also poorly hydrated and hadn't slept much the day before. It was not going to be pretty.

It seemed much hotter this day than it had the day before. We were drenched to the bone before class even began, and it seemed as though we were standing on the surface of the sun. As we moved into our first backwards bend I looked up and to the back, as you do when you're bending backwards, and that's when I saw it.

Right, directly above us.
The heating device/humidifier.

I stared at Lady J in disbelief, mouth agape, finger pointed up at the mouth of 'the dragon'. It was official. We were going to die.

By the time we were nearing the end of the first fifty minutes, the sick pickle-y feeling in my gut was growing. The room was spinning, and it was time to leave. Staying would only have resulted in some sort of catastrophic yoga injury (the likes of which the world has never seen).

I curled up in the locker room and waited for my stomach to stop flipping. Lady J joined me shortly there after.

One of the nice girls who worked there brought us some coconut water (which for the record, is basically inedible. Yuck). We drank it through gritted teeth, hoping it would make us feel better, and you know what? It actually did. (Even if it was just awful). Lady J went back in and finished up the class. I did not. No thank you. I was not about to have to leave the room twice in one class. That would be unacceptable.

It turns out that back corner is empty for a reason. It's 3-4 degrees hotter back there and much more humid. While that doesn't sound like a big difference, when you remember the rest of the room is already a toasty 104 degrees with 40% humidity, that means that back corner is approaching the 110 degree mark. Yuck.

But even if it was terrible, we learned two valuable lessons: Stay away from the mouth of the dragon, and if everybody in the class is avoiding an area, there's probably a reason for that.

To be continued....

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