Day 1 (Again): Old Lady Yoga Kicked My Ass

I debated with myself about how to label this post in terms of what day of yoga I'm on. I did over 70 days of consecutive yoga but I stopped when my son was in the hospital and never restarted. In terms of his project, I'm technically continuing it but after a three month hiatus, it seemed more appropriate to start over but this time I'm going in with more knowledge about my limitations and how yoga makes me feel.

Yesterday, my mother-in-law invited me to a yoga class she was going to be leading. She knows about my lapsed yoga challenge and that I've been wanting to get back into it. My mother-in-law told me that the class was full of older women--not challenging, she said, but it'd get me back on my mat. As my body has atrophied into that of a 90-year-old since I paused my challenge, I thought the class sounded like it'd be just my speed.

Let's do this!

What I forgot about yoga is that it's not exclusively a young person's sport. For every 19-year-old in Lululemon pants, there's a yoga practitioner who looks like this:

"Suck on this, AARP."

To make myself feel better, I'm telling myself the class was hard because I haven't done yoga in three months but OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HURTS.

Nope, can't get up today.
I'll be an adult tomorrow.

When the class started, I felt proud of myself that I was successfully doing five circuits of the Ashtanga A series. I wasn't collapsing when I lowered myself down from plank pose and even though my legs weren't as straight as they used to be during the forward fold, I felt like I was still doing well. Then when we moved on to the B series, my shoulders started to give out during plank pose and I discovered that my Edelman shoulder is still a thing.

You son of a bitch.

On the plus side, I received compliments on my locust pose so at least I was able to do a good job in something other than savasana.

I'm apparently really good at being a bug.

I'm planning on doing a little yoga later but I'm going to have to be mindful of my shoulders . . . and my back . . . and my hips . . . and my legs . . .

Can I do a whole practice of just savasana?