Every once in a while I make a return to yoga as if I’m trying it out for the first time and have forgotten how much I “nothing” it. It’s like forgetting how crappy candy corn is for 11 months out of the year, only to rediscover it in October and remember how waxy it tastes. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give hot yoga a try because I’m doing two tropical destination half Ironman races next season and figured the humid yoga room could potentially help a bit with acclimation. I’ve done hot yoga a couple times. It’s not bad, but since I’m naturally a sweaty person, I’m literally the only one in the room whose shins are sweating because I’m perspiring so much. I end up in my shame corner soaking wet while these yoga goddesses in booty shorts, sports bras, and 12-packs are contorting their bodies into pretzels without even a strand of hair getting frizzy. It’s lame. This time around I bought a Living Social (or Groupon, or whatever the daily deal site was) special for a hot yoga place in Capitol Hill and my friend Lauren and I met up to try it out. We showed up and filled out the “I won’t sue the facility if I sweat myself to death” forms, then dropped our stuff off in the locker room before stepping into the hot yoga room. The first thing I noticed (and smelled) was that the space was carpeted. Uh what? This is a 90-minute yoga session in which the room is heated to over 90 degrees and someone thought it’d be smart to carpet the floors? It stank like musty feet and stale armpit sweat. I was not thrilled. Lauren and I set up shop in the back of the room. I spread out my brand new yoga mat that I bought off Amazon.com because apparently forest green is an unpopular mat color (pink, on the other hand, would have cost me a monthly car payment). The sinewy instructor entered and started the group off with a ridiculously long series of breaths and shouts. Everyone began to moan as if they were zombies, and I instinctively looked for the nearest ax or blunt object in case I needed to peg someone in the head and make my sweaty escape. After the B.S. breathing, we began contorting and stretching and yoga-ing. The instructor kept firing off instructions one after another without pausing, making me wonder if she doubles as an auctioneer on the weekends. She’d bark at me and Lauren every so often whenever we didn’t contort to her liking, and she kept calling Lauren “Laura,” which got more and more awkward the longer we were in class. Pretty soon I was drenched with sweat. I couldn’t see because whenever I’d bend over, all of the perspiration on my face would dump into my eyes. My towel was all spongy so it offered little reprieve. I sighed and kept telling myself that somehow this would help me survive the hot and humid runs in Costa Rica and Hawaii. At one point I looked down and saw that I was so saturated with sweaty nastiness that the scab on my knee (which I got from scraping it on the bottom of the pool during the previous week’s swim class, another reason why swim class is dumb) had hydrated itself and fallen off. It was now perched on my yoga mat in a soggy little ball. My reaction: I was literally sous vide-ing myself to the point where parts of me were falling off. It was like shredding a slow cooked piece of pork. Four...

This week I tried a yoga class for the first time. Having been unimpressed with Pilates (well, with the class I tried, anyway), I didn’t have high expectations for yoga but nevertheless felt like I should at least give it a try, seeing as how I’ve met my share of buff women who swear by it. I entered the dimly lit yoga room about a minute after the class started. It was full of men and women who were sitting cross-legged on yoga mats. I panicked when I thought it was BYOM (Bring Your Own Mat) but then saw a stack of extras in the corner of the room. After grabbing a mat, I picked an open spot on the floor and sat down…then I stood back up and kicked off my socks and shoes when I realized that everyone else was barefoot. (Seriously, what is with yoga and Pilates being barefoot requisite? The only exercise I’m used to doing sans shoes is swimming.) The yoga instructor was giving us pleasant-sounding instructions amid the New Age music and the white Christmas lights. She kept flicking her eyes over to me, having noticed the Outsider vibes I was giving off. I don’t blame her for staring — I was the only person in the room wearing a tank top and exercise shorts, so I must have looked downright nutty compared to the fashionable yogaphiles in leg warmers, almost pants, and off-the shoulder sweaters. I felt like I was in a room full of Flashdance extras. We started the class off with a few minutes of meditation. The instructor told us to close our eyes and just “relax and let the day’s events melt away.” I found that it was difficult to close my eyes and relax while loud trash talking permeated the room from the adjacent basketball court. It’s not easy to ignore repeated shouts of “AGHHHHH!” and “Not in MY house!” Somehow, everyone else in the room managed to close their eyes and appeared to go to their happy places while I looked around and gawked at them. (I do the same thing at dinners whenever the family insists on saying grace before we eat.) From there we did a lot of stretchy stuff and pretended to be various animals. In the course of an hour I was a dog, an alligator, a snake, an eagle, a “happy baby,” and other creatures. It’s like we were starring in our own version of Michael Jackson’s Black or White video. (Speaking of the “dog” moves, whenever the instructor told us to “get in the up dog position,” I resisted the urge to cheekily say “What’s up dog?” in hopes that she’d respond with “Not much, what’s up with you?” I’m such a dork.) I kept up with the moves while stifling chicken quesadilla burps and silently cursing myself for eating Mexican for lunch. At the end of the workout the instructor had us lay flat on the ground and close our eyes while she went around the room and “adjusted” people. I laid there and found out that “getting adjusted” consisted of her walking over to me and holding my legs up in the air for a few seconds, then gently placing them back on the floor. I’m not sure what the purpose of these adjustments are other than to realign my chi or something. Maybe my aura looked crooked. Overall, yoga wasn’t too shabby. I felt it was mostly easy, with only a couple of poses that were difficult. I can see the benefit of doing yoga once a week or so for stretching purposes. The class was palatable —...