"Its all about balance."
"Do you mean physical balance or mental balance?"
"From physical balance comes mental balance"
"Why do you do it? What do you get out of it? Is it for relaxation?...."
I had just told my friend about the feeling of satisfaction Karen and I both had after our successful attainment of Pinca Mayurasana (also known as the peacock feather), and her interest was peaked. To do the pose you place your forearms and palms flat on the ground to anchor your base, then you bend at the elbow and bring your entire body over your head, lift your head up, bend your back, bring your feet together in an arc parallel to your head. The arc of your body with your head lifted up forms the shape of peacock feather. Having our feet against the wall really helped. We had been practicing, doing elbow dog, building up our arms and shoulders, and finally, we made it up. Inversions such as this forearm balance, shoulder stand, hand stands and the most classic of all yoga poses, the head stand, are invigorating postures, bringing blood to the head and energy to the body. They are physically demanding and require strength, flexibility and-balance. If you stack the vertebrae one on top of each other and let the skeleton do its work, it is much easier to remain inverted for a prolonged time. Consider the elephant. They can do "hand stands" yet they weigh thousands of pounds. They balance themselves on their forelegs. Thus far, in my limited experience of sustained inversion, I have to work hard to remain erect, lifting out of my shoulders contracting my abs, my psoas, as my back muscles sing-a pool of sweat forming around me on the floor. Is it relaxing? I am so exhausted afterwards that I fell quite relaxed.
Last week we attended a yoga workshop in Evanston. The focus of the workshop was on pranayama, yogic breathing. And using the breath to work with asanas. In stead of struggling, you only work in a range that is comfortable. When we did Sirsasana, head stands, he explained about the two spots on your head corresponding to the top two chakras. If you place your weight above the forward spot on the top flat part of your head it requires the expenditure of tremendous effort to stay u, but if you balance over the rear spot, it was relaxing and one could remain inverted indefinitely. The pool of sweat under me indicated that I hadn't located the correct balance spot-then with a minor correction by the instructor, aligning my feet over my head, suddenly I experienced tremendous relief from my effort. By then though I was spent and trembling from the exertion, but I had glimpsed it, the balance. I am still struggling with hand stands, but my victory over Pinca Mayurasana has bolstered my confidence. Soon all of the elementary poses we do in class will be within my grasp. Today I feel the pain of that accomplishment in my shoulders and upper biceps. My anterior deltoids are sore, that divine soreness from working out, not the pain of injury. Seemingly an all too common feeling over the last few years.
I believe that Yoga has cured all my running inflicted ailments. In fact we started to do yoga originally to augment running, imagining that it was passive stretching. Indeed it is stretching, total maximum stretching. But it is so much more. It is difficult and challenging exercise. The only weight you lift is your own. You have to learn how to use your skeleton instead of your muscles. But it is more than stretching and exercise. Our teacher told us that asana practice without esoteric knowledge is just exercise.
In the summer of 1994 post Madison Marathon, 50 mile weeks and an all out sprint down the big hill at the end of the Bix 7, I came up with an injured iliopsoas muscle, the hip flexor where the psoas and illiacus cross through the pelvic crown. On a hot run in August at a about 15 miles my psoas seized up on me. Two weeks later on another 20 miler, it seized on my again. But when I was pushing the pace at the Scenic 10, about mile 6 it seized up on me and this time it felt like I got shot in the hip with a shotgun. Greg Domantay explained my injury to me, said I needed to strengthen the abs, that the psoas was over working, and that I needed to stretch it. I managed to get a PR at Philadelphia marathon despite the down hill indulgence at mile 11, when it started acting up. From mile 11 to 19 I held back on the verge of seizure, but finished strong anyway. After that it was so sore that I could hardly walk for weeks, let alone run.
About then we enrolled for yoga at the park district of Oak Park. Maybe stretching would help. Our teacher was fantastic. We were very intrigued with the teaching. We learned how to breath, how to use our breath to extend the stretch, to do more than we imagined possible with amazing ease. All it takes is slow steady effort and not to be greedy. We learned that we could stretch much further if we didn't lunge forward and go for the maximum stretch, instead, you start slowly and extend the stretch. A metaphor for living. We learned that the purpose of the asana is to prepare the body for meditation. I thought that doing the asana was the meditation. Now two years later I learn that Mr. Iyengar thinks so also. Instead of getting stretching classes, we find ourselves having a mystical life changing experience.
Our teacher mentioned the Runner's Yoga Book by Jean Couch. The first thing I read in it was the chapter "Save the psoas." As runners we overuse the psoas at the expense of the abs. This explains the posture of many runners. I thought all the crunchies I was doing would have strengthened my abs. I learned in the book that the way I was doing them I was using my psoas, not isolating the abs. So, I started doing yoga sit ups (feet flat on the wall, isolating the abs), leg lifts etc. Combined with the stretching my iliopsoas injury started healing. Our teacher taught me the half cobra, bound angle pose, the boat-positions that stretched the iliopsoas and worked the abs. It took almost 9 months before my iliopsoas healed but I am sure doing yoga healed me. Karen had been plagued by a chronic knee injury, effectively side lining her for 2 years. After she did yoga for several months the standing poses began to strengthen her quads. After finding the right shoes and continuing the standing poses, her knee problem was cured.
Yoga just gets bigger and bigger for us. It is something that you can always do better at, you are never there. In the halcyon days of running, during the first 7 or 8 years after beginning running, I leveled off. PRs became few and far between. Coming back from injury I never seemed to have gotten it all back (not that I had that much anyway), but the fear of kicking it into overdrive and feeling my hamstring burst haunts me. But somehow achieving a feat so mundane as Pinca Mayurasana charges me with energy and instills new confidence. I find running and yoga to be so complementary. Yoga is definitely cutting into my running time, but it sure is fun to be experiencing PRs again.
Check out these yoga links