March 5th 2013 was a special day. If my life were to flash past my eyes that day will definitely be on that flashback!
The San Jose Bikram Yoga center had a challenge. Do Yoga 60 times in 60 days. The idea was to come every day. But if you had to miss a day for travel or other reasons, you take a class in that location or do a makeup class the same week. I had originally misinterpreted the Challenge to be 60 days in 10 weeks. That meant one rest day a week. Later found out that it was 60 days 60 classes. No rest day!
Given my once a week trip for work, was doubting my ability to go take up this challenge. With a lot of encouragement from San and the kids as well as my co-workers and the entire BYSJ community, signed up on Jan 5th. March 5th was day 60! March 5th was also class 60!
It was a roller coaster ride where the body and mind went through more than a few challenges. Hot Yoga is not a new thing in this family now. On March 11th, it will be two years since the day MIL and myself attended our very first Bikram Yoga class. Even in our best stretch of 91 days attendance in our first 100 days, we took breaks every now and then. There was the day or two where we said "let's not push it. we can go tomorrow". That determination to go to class when you are slightly sore from an outing with the wife and kids or when you ate dinner at some restaurant with co-workers and it doesn't agree with your stomach or you just drove past Sacramento and back between 6AM and 5PM with one long meeting thrown in and came in to a Yoga class at 6:30 PM so you don't miss a day.. was simply not there in any previous streches of doing Yoga.
When we first started Bikram Yoga, our weight was dropping every day, we were becoming stronger and more flexible, our skin was glowing.. the benefits were visible and measurable and obvious to everyone around us. So just the fact that people around you notice positive changes keeps you going. After you go for a few years, the changes are incremental. Every few weeks or so, you manage to reach a new level in one of the poses or your body and mind work together to realize that you have been interpreting the teachers words slightly off and correct for it. In short, slow and steady progress. Fortunately being a Six Sigma person and having run a Fab, yours truly understands the value of Continuous Improvement and that helps a lot!
It is more of a metal challenge to do 60 classes in 60 days. Once you manage to get up at 4:45, get ready, drive to the Yoga studio, spread that mat and lie down to savor the heat, you realize that you will have a great class. Making it to the room is the hard part. Doing the Yoga after that is like hot fudge! (Not a big fan of icing on cakes if you can't tell by now).
There were so many days in the last 60 that either tested my physical strength or resolve where San or the kids or most importantly my MIL (who has been coming with me to Yoga class the last 17 days) would say "Don't you dare give up now!" San even let me go to evening class for a lot of days and said "I will take care of both the kids routines. Just go.. and I am letting you do this only because you are doing the challenge and you have come so far!" and I accepted her offer with tears in my eyes. The challenge did some funny stuff to the head too and I would get all emotional and weepy, especially between day 45 to 60!
The challenge was also well documented in Excel to see if the stats would tell me something or let me share anything with the rest of the world. . .
First things first. If you do take a challenge like this, it might not be a bad idea to take two classes on weekends in same day just to compensate for future misses..
If that strategy had not been adopted, it would have been a good reason for the mind to say "no way to catch up now.. so drop it!"
There was a self imposed goal to track how the classes actually went, just to see if the energy level stayed flat, increased, decreased, tracked the lunar cycle.. just wanted to see what the data showed, especially after hearing from other folks who said that one starts sitting down for a lot of poses towards the middle of the challenge.
Now for the weight tracking. It was more of an afterthought to track weight on a daily basis. One thing I learned over this weighing process is that when you drink two 500mL bottles of water within an hour after you finish class, that is 2.2 lbs. Started to measure exactly an hour after class and that showed good tasty food does correlate to a baseline weight change!
When you track stuff and enter a few things every day on a spreadsheet before going to bed, you can actually have some fun trying to stare at the data..
There was a stretch where the classes in general were intense and there was one weekend where a 10 year anniversary class had a record 100+ people in the room. It was more of a communal event than a class and I did push myself way past my limits and that correlated to the low weight and the 4 missed poses the next day. Other than that there are many factors that are not charted that could be reasons for the red bars.. One good thing? Managed to do the 60 classes without missing more than 26 poses.
Even tracked the count by teacher. The list was 20 strong and the count ranged from 6 to 1. Do have favorites within the 30+ teachers and my favorites are different from the MIL's favorites. MIL and me classify teachers into three groups. The fire breathing dragons who push you past your limits just with their voice, the horsewhisperers who get you into a trance and make you do what they say and teachers who are a combination of both. They push you during the pose and calm you down with their voice when you are in relax mode. While I love the dragons, the MIL prefers the horsewhisperers. Maybe it is an age or personality thing.. End of the day, have a lot of teachers to thank, for encouraging and watching out for what I do in class and giving me suggestions to improve my practice!
When we ask a lot of folks we meet regularly after class "Did you sign up for the challenge?" the answer is "No. I come 2-3 times a week regularly anyways. So don't see any reason to do this 60 day thing!". I used to go a lot more "regularly" and still, this was a great eye opener. If you are doing Bikram Yoga and your studio has a 60 day challenge, TAKE IT! Why?
1. There are a lot of poses that I was stuck at with a certain level or step. Have managed to get past those points during this challenge. Do not know if it has something to do with the ability to form muscle memory when you go without a break of more than a day, but the end result is obvious. Maybe you will get past those sticky points.
2. It is not easy to prioritize Yoga over other things. Need a high level of dedication to go pull it off and you get to test your ability to do a good thing for yourself above other things. Kind of makes you realize that the most important thing in your life, is "your life"!
3. Your whole family might cheer for you and support you. San, the kids and the MIL who joined me for the last 15 classes.. which was the most difficult streach, supported me like never before! They have also never openly said "I am proud of you" under any circumstance in recent times and hearing them say that was worth the effort.
4. Finally, you realize that you can actually pull it off and it was not an unrealistic goal as you originally thought! Realizing you are made of tougher stuff (mentally and physically) than you thought is a great reward in itself.
Then again, if you are a nerd you might also have some fun staring at Yoga graphs for a change...
ps. Will post pictures next week of the new and improved Shaolin monk looking me..
