"Feel the stress of the day melt away, while breathing in the positivity of the screaming match I'm about to partake in."

Corpse pose.  How the ultra fit work out.

I use the website Dailymile.com to track my workouts.  It's a helpful tool because they keep track of total mileage and send encouraging emails every once and a while to show the trends in my fitness routine.  Dailymile also has a widget you can connect to your blog that reports your latest workout, which adds accountability for my physical activity.

However, Dailymile is only helpful if you remember to log your workouts, which I have been forgetting lately.  This was brought to my attention when I received an "It's been NINE days since your last workout - are you okay or have you fallen into an endless bag of oreo cookies?" email from them, bringing my slacker tendencies to light.

My last logged exercise was a 5.2 mile run, which for me is pretty impressive, and I'm sure on some subconscious level I didn't want to replace that publicly with some 1000 yard swim.  Then I got out of the habit of tracking through Dailymile, which prompted some concern on their part (or an automatic email, I'm not sure which) so now I am here to assure you, my dear reader, with the beautiful poetry that is Fergie and the Black Eyed Peas, that I've been "up at the gym just workin' on my fitness".

Here is one of the highlights.

The best part of the week for me was definitely yoga.  I love this particular class because it's taught by the "young" instructor (Natalie) and she uses the Twilight soundtrack as her background music.  I think she thinks no one knows this, but um, I'm kinda a fan of Twilight.  Her music choice is perfect because there are a few go-to's in my arsenal of stress-relief.  Yoga is one, and eating handfuls of doritos while watching Twilight is another.  So yoga and Twilight are like the best stress-relief combination ever.  After a yoga session backed by Twilight I'm like Crush from Finding Nemo.  "Whatever, Dude." Nothin' phases me.  I'm super chilled out.

I kid you not, I tried this.
I failed miserably.  But I tried.

This particular class was no different. (Except Natalie introduced a new position where you get into a squat, put your hands on the floor in front of you, brace your elbows against your knees, and then balance your entire body weight on your freaking hands.)(It totally didn't happen for me.)(But I did try.)(Unlike all the other people that said, "Yeah, right," in disbelief.)(I mean, they remained upright while I crashed to a heap on the floor with an audible, "Ooomph," but I tried.)



This particular class had all the calming effects I've come to love about yoga.  I spent a whole hour working out all my "I'm about to start my period and I'm a cranky ball of tight muscles and irrational emotion," feelings of the day.  We were ending yoga with corpse pose, and Natalie was saying soothing things that I tune out because it's just not my thing.  I was in a perfectly sleepy state because not only we were in corpse pose, but there was a thunderstorm outside and it was a little warm inside our class.  I was daydreaming about what I could go eat after class (because that's what everyone does as they are leaving the fitness center, right?)(I totally chose Cheerios, if you were wondering) when all of a sudden my eyes flew open at the jarring sound of a loud verbal spat.  Natalie, in the midst of her Zen-like murmurings, was interrupted by the instructor for the next class, who burst in the room and yelled, "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO GET OUT FIVE MINUTES AGO."

Because our entire class was so relaxed, centered, and generally at peace with the universe, three different woman responded (from the floor, still in corpse pose) "WHAT THE HELL?" "THAT IS SO RUDE!" "IT'S NOT NATALIE'S FAULT WE ARE LATE!" (Now, I love Natalie, but it totally was Natalie's fault we ran over.)(In the interest of fairness.)

Natalie replied with, "EVERYBODY CALM DOWN." The other instructor informed us that her "ENTIRE CLASS OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN STANDING IN THE HALLWAY FOR FIVE MINUTES FOR A CLASS THEY PAID FOR," implying it's superiority to our general admission yoga that merely requires one shell out the yearly $400 fee to be able to attend.  Natalie rolled her eyes (oh yes she did) and apologized sort of with, "I'M SORRY BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE RUDE ABOUT IT."

At this point I knew I was clearly at the best yoga class I would ever attend, because who expects yoga to turn into a fight?  It was awesome.  I was waiting for it to escalate further (my money was on Natalie not only because she's young and super buff, but also because she looks like she might be the kind of person that resorts to hair-pulling and ear biting)(like Mike Tyson)(but only as a twenty-something white girl from the 'burbs) but what really happened was that our class started packing up, mostly tense about the situation, and the other class trickled in, looking oddly embarrassed to be there.  Once we saw their embarrassment we played it up and managed to look wounded at the abrupt ending of our yoga time, because apparently we were all raised Catholic and/or by Jewish grandmothers and know a lot about manipulation through guilt.

Thanks to the fight, I left feeling exhilarated.  I felt energized and full of life.  It was an amazing feeling.  I'm going to petition that the makers of yoga look into officially replacing corpse pose with some kind of surprise exciting event (probably not always a fight because that would get stale fast)(but maybe something like a fake fire that triggers the sprinkers)(or you know that machine at the eye doctor's that blows air at your eyeball? That would work as well)(that thing always scares the bejeebers out of me), because that was my favorite yoga class ever.