Day 19 (Late): Get Down with the Sickness

It seems that I've caught my son's cold. I suppose that comes with the territory but it's been ages since I've had a cold and my sinuses are not happy. I did yoga last night before bed but when I was done, I felt super sick and just crawled into bed. I felt nauseated which is odd since I hadn't felt like that all day and I don't now, either. Maybe I pushed myself too hard during my practice, maybe it has something to do with drainage, maybe I sat up too fast after savasana--who knows? But since I felt so horrible, I decided to let the post go until this morning so here we are.

Before my practice, I looked up some poses for when you have a cold. A lot of what I saw included things like plow and headstands which I'm sure are great but just weren't going to happen. I've never been able to do a headstand and while I've done plow before, I haven't done it recently and I didn't think it was a good idea to try it for the first time while sick and less than three weeks into my year of yoga challenge.

Guys, I'm like really good at yoga.

But there were others that I could do, namely bridge, reclined cobbler, and standing forward bend. Although I couldn't do the full inversion of a headstand, I figured that maybe an inversion of any kind could have at least similar benefits so I spent a lot of time in downward dog, too.

My back is tight (as usual) so I also did a lot of cat and cow which felt great. My back actually popped at one point during cat--I'm not sure if it was supposed to do that, but it felt nice anyway.

Once again, I mostly focused on floor work because I was super tired and kind of lazy but I'm going to blame that on my cold and not on the fact that I was doing yoga at nearly midnight. When I was researching poses that are good for colds, another one I saw suggested was widespread forward bend. I figured that one wouldn't be that hard because it just involved sitting on the floor, spreading my legs apart, and leaning forward. I can comfortably go pretty far forward in cobbler's pose so I figured this one wouldn't be too bad.

No.

It turns out that cobbler's pose uses different leg muscles than widespread forward bend. My cobbler's pose muscles are all stretchy but my other ones are . . . not.

This is about as far apart as my legs would go.

But I stuck it out and tried to do a few breaths in my limited range of motion in this pose. I can't get more flexible if I don't try, right?

I finished with some reclined cobbler before moving into savasana. Savasana felt really, really good--so good in fact, that I totally fell asleep. I was probably asleep for about twenty minutes or so before I woke up and when I sat up, I had the aforementioned problem of feeling super sick. My yoga practice concluded with me crawling into bed and just trying to fall asleep.

My practice feels a little lame but I think I need to keep in mind that I am sick and that pushing myself really hard right now isn't going to do me any favors. Simple restoratives might be the way to go until I'm feeling better.