Day 11: The Yoga Debacle

I have not formally exercised in about 8 years, there were a couple of random treadmill sessions when my friends dragged me to the gym with their guest pass, and in Montreal we walked all over the city on a regular basis.

This spring, I decided that as I am now closer to 30 than 20 I should do something nice for my heart, so it is good to me in the future. After giving myself a couple of weeks to recover from med school I decided I would start with something easy; a half an hour of yoga, some nice sun salutations. After about 10 minutes I was huffing and puffing, so I switched over to some other random things like lunges and sit ups to round off the grand total of 20 minutes. I was pretty pleased with myself.

The following morning, I woke up and turned to the side; and ‘pulled’ every muscle on the right side of my neck. Everything remained in a tense spasm for an entire week, it was horrific. I tried everything to make it go away, I iced it, I sat awkwardly with a hot water bottle perched on my shoulder for hours, I sat in my mom’s car and turned on the heated seat. Eventually, after rubbing buckets of Bengay on it and making every person I saw massage my neck and shoulder, the spasm subsided.

Subsequently, any time I have even thought of getting off my scrawny, but exceptionally lazy ass to exercise, my neck has had a spasm, although much less severe in nature it has been enough to make me suspicious of my body’s motives. I think my sloth body is fighting my determined mind.

You see, I’ll let you in on a secret – one of my friends’ climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and I was inspired to want to do the same thing. What fun! What an adventure that would be! I can see myself standing on the top of the mountain dancing around, perhaps someone is handing me a trophy for my efforts, who knows what goes on up there!

Unfortunately, I can’t walk up 2 flights of stairs without getting winded and anytime I even think about raising my heart rate my neck has a spasm. But now I’m putting it in writing, and dear reader I promise, tomorrow you will get evidence of me on an elliptical. Although, I am not entirely sure which machine is the elliptical.