I’ve done hot yoga a couple times. It’s not bad, but since I’m naturally a sweaty person, I’m literally the only one in the room whose shins are sweating because I’m perspiring so much. I end up in my shame corner soaking wet while these yoga goddesses in booty shorts, sports bras, and 12-packs are contorting their bodies into pretzels without even a strand of hair getting frizzy. It’s lame. This time around I bought a Living Social (or Groupon, or whatever the daily deal site was) special for a hot yoga place in Capitol Hill and my friend Lauren and I met up to try it out.

We showed up and filled out the “I won’t sue the facility if I sweat myself to death” forms, then dropped our stuff off in the locker room before stepping into the hot yoga room. The first thing I noticed (and smelled) was that the space was carpeted. Uh what? This is a 90-minute yoga session in which the room is heated to over 90 degrees and someone thought it’d be smart to carpet the floors? It stank like musty feet and stale armpit sweat. I was not thrilled.

Lauren and I set up shop in the back of the room. I spread out my brand new yoga mat that I bought off Amazon.com because apparently forest green is an unpopular mat color (pink, on the other hand, would have cost me a monthly car payment). The sinewy instructor entered and started the group off with a ridiculously long series of breaths and shouts. Everyone began to moan as if they were zombies, and I instinctively looked for the nearest ax or blunt object in case I needed to peg someone in the head and make my sweaty escape.

After the B.S. breathing, we began contorting and stretching and yoga-ing. The instructor kept firing off instructions one after another without pausing, making me wonder if she doubles as an auctioneer on the weekends. She’d bark at me and Lauren every so often whenever we didn’t contort to her liking, and she kept calling Lauren “Laura,” which got more and more awkward the longer we were in class.

Pretty soon I was drenched with sweat. I couldn’t see because whenever I’d bend over, all of the perspiration on my face would dump into my eyes. My towel was all spongy so it offered little reprieve. I sighed and kept telling myself that somehow this would help me survive the hot and humid runs in Costa Rica and Hawaii. At one point I looked down and saw that I was so saturated with sweaty nastiness that the scab on my knee (which I got from scraping it on the bottom of the pool during the previous week’s swim class, another reason why swim class is dumb) had hydrated itself and fallen off. It was now perched on my yoga mat in a soggy little ball.

My reaction:

Das nasty!

I was literally sous vide-ing myself to the point where parts of me were falling off. It was like shredding a slow cooked piece of pork. Four moves later I looked down and the scab was gone, probably absorbed into the Carpet of Horrors to join the kaleidoscope of DNA that will one day birth a mutant CHUDbaby who knows how to do the Feathered Peacock pose.

Finally the class ended and we escaped from the oven to the cool Seattle air. I weighed myself when I got home and saw that I was 2 1/2 lbs lighter, all of which had gotten absorbed into the nasty floor along with my knee scab. I felt like some sort of disgusting Johnny Appleseed.

I haven’t been back since I sweat my scab off, but I’ll probably drag myself to some more classes to see if it’ll help with the tropical race climate I’ll be subjected to in March and June. I haven’t accumulated any new scrapes or cuts, so this is my narrow window of opportunity to return without leaving a piece of me behind…

Unsurprisingly, this mediocre athlete don’t do flip turns. I very obviously lack the coordination and skill to pull off a graceful somersault in the water and push off the wall in one fluid motion. Once I went to a flip turn clinic that Teresa was teaching at the Seattle Athletic Club, and not only did I burn out my sinuses from the military-grade chlorine that flooded my nasal passages every time I contorted my body underwater (Teresa’s shouts to “Tuck your chin!” did not help, as apparently I am incapable of scrunching my head in that manner), I would more often than not attempt to flip at the end of the lane and end up in the one next to me, having somehow maneuvered myself underneath the lane divider and crookedly emerging in some other swimmer’s personal space. “Just practice doing flip turns during your warm ups and cool downs!”, Teresa would tell me. Uh yeah, if I can’t even stay in my lane during a mostly empty swim clinic, I can’t imagine a pool full of lap swimmers would appreciate my flailing appendages slapping into them while I repeatedly apologize and insist to their bruised faces that practice makes perfect.

So yeah, flip turns aren’t for me. It’s not a big deal–I’m slow and crappy enough as it is, so adding a flip turn into the mix isn’t going to be the deciding factor in me suddenly becoming as fast as Dara Torres. When I get to the wall I just turn around and push off, so it’s not like I’m taking a five minute break at each end. I’ve accepted the fact that flip turns and I will never have a future together in a pool with a yard and a white picket fence and 2.5 kiddie pools, and that’s okay.

Or so I thought. Here T was trying to force flip turns on me once again. She’d have us swim for a bit and then do something dumb like somersault in the middle of the pool. Fortunately, she exempted those of us who “got dizzy” when trying flip turns, so I feigned vertigo and opted just to swim a couple laps instead. The next step was to have people swim to the end of a lane and attempt a flip turn, but I opted to splash around in the middle of the pool and daydream about the day when the swim portion of a triathlon would be replaced with something more practical like light stretching or cookie eating.

After the flip turn nonsense, as the workout came to an end I thought I was in the clear. And then T did something especially dastardly: she combined my two most loathed swim activities, flip turns and relays. Teresa is a fan of concluding the swim classes with some relay bullshit, which I hate because it makes me irrationally stressed. She breaks us into groups and gives us some dumb stuff to do, like everyone has to do 50 yards of drills or some swim stroke I never practice and totally suck at. This part of the workout is always terrible because it’s at the end, so I’m already exhausted and can barely swim any more, and because I’m slow as shit so I always feel like I’m letting my team down (the last two times I did a swim relay with a group, my team came in last).

So now we were tasked with swimming 50 yards starting from the middle of the pool, with one end being a flip turn and the other end being a push off. My group consisted of Fast Guy, Fast Guy, Fast Guy, and me. I refused to be the anchor because I didn’t want to totally ruin whatever lead we had going in, so they stuck me in the third position. When it was my turn to go, I swam to the wall and skipped the whole “flip turn” part, figuring my faux-dizziness excuse would exempt me. I finished my leg and my last teammate took off to finish. When he was done we realized we were in first place. Hooray! Wahoo! We’re #1!

And then Teresa disqualified us because I didn’t do a flip turn. What?! But…vertigo! Dizziness! Or maybe just an unwillingness to do them because they hurt my sinuses and I suck at them and they’re stupid! Whatever. Flip turns are overrated–it’s not like skipping the turn gave me a 30 second lead or anything. Sorry I let you down, guys. I was the turd in the punchbowl.

We did another relay to end the workout, then called it a day. And so Saturday was Teresa’s yearly attempt to get me to work on flip turns. Teresa, in case you’re thinking about trying to teach them to me again, here’s some advice from resident Mean Girl Regina George:

"Flip turns" and "fetch": both failed experiments.

The clinic was held at a park, and Teresa would time us from our simulated swim to bike transition, and again from swim to run. She’d shout out our times with much excitement and encouragement, and I’d feel like a freakin’ champ because I was flying out of the fake water and to my little transition spot so speedily. “I so got this,” I thought. “I’mma be so gee dee fast in transition.” I even took notes and photos of the whole process so I could study it diligently and be the fastest mofo in T1 and 2:

A tidy transition setup

That same week, I had my first ever open water swim. Before the workout, I envisioned myself exiting the water like a total pro and expertly stripping off my wetsuit like I learned in the transition clinic. Then, of course, I actually got in the water and everything I learned flew out the window. It was May and Lake Washington was like 50 degrees, so our group didn’t so much swim as flop around in the water and screech due to the hardcore zipper sting (which is when the water seeps into your wetsuit from various entrances, usually the zipper, and chills you the eff out). My workout turned into a 15 minute flail fest as I dully punched the water with frozen fists and heavily plunked my feet in instead of exhibiting anything remotely resembling decent form.

Finally, when my icy torture was over, I trudged out of the water and attempted to do my “speedy” transition.” Unfortunately, the freezing temperatures + Madison beach stairs equaled me sporting windmill arms and rubber legs as I attempted to exit. I MC Skat Katted two steps forward, one step back, threatening to fall into the water more times than I’d care to admit. It was most definitely a sad sight to behold — I think Teresa trained me in 2008 thinking I was physically and mentally handicapped.

At last I managed to creep over to a safe distance away from the beach, where I tiredly pawed at my zipper pull, twirling around like an idiot until I had the strap in my tundra clutches. I yanked my suit down and promptly keeled over when trying to pull it off my legs. By the time I wrestled myself free from my waterproof sausage casing, it had been several minutes and I was pathetically tired from the effort. I had really put my transition clinic knowledge to good use.

Thankfully, practice makes less embarrassing (which is how the saying goes for me), and after enough races I can safely say I’m pretty decent at transitioning. The only thing I don’t do is start out with my cycling shoes on the bike — I tried it at another clinic and was pretty sucktastic at it, so I haven’t bothered to try it out during an actual race. I have considered slipping out of my cycling shoes as I roll into transition instead of running through T2 in them because my Speedplay cleats are clunky mother effers and virtually impossible to “run” in without rolling an ankle. Maybe it’s something I’ll work on this coming season…Teresa would just love it if I bugged her for another clinic so she can watch me zig zag around the park looking like a total spaz.

I want to improve a lot in 2009, and I figured that a huge area of opportunity would be improving my swim. I think I can shave anywhere from 5-15 minutes off my worst half Ironman swim time, depending on how much I train. So I cued up the training montage music and signed up for a dry land swim conditioning class that would help strengthen my body and improve my swim stroke, technique, and stamina.

Teresa teaches the swim conditioning class, and for good reason. She swam for the University of Nevada-Reno and is one fast mofo. My triathlon trainer is often the first female out of the water during races, and she was the fastest female swimmer in her age division at the Kona World Championships. She is pretty much twice as fast as me in the water. It’s depressing. I remember that for my first open water swim she gave me like a 5 minute head start before swimming after me, and she and I got to the buoy at the same time. Sigh.

Anyway, I signed up for an hour of interval bike training and then did the swim conditioning class immediately afterwards. I’m not that hungry in the mornings so all I had to eat before working out was 3/4 of a Kashi Go Lean bar and some water. By the end of my dual workout I was ready to devour a mid-size farm animal.

Betsy was my swim conditioning buddy that morning. We started by squatting down and chucking a huge weighted ball back and forth to each other, then we did about 40 triceps dips. After more ball passes and a second set of dips I was already feeling the dreaded jell-o arm effect…and we were only about 10 minutes into the workout. Oh God, I was in trouble.

Let me pause and show you roughly what my triceps look like:

I have the arm strength of a feeble cartoon octogenarian, and every exercise during this class was exploiting them with sadistic, unrelenting glee.

Teresa made me get on the Vasa trainer, where I repeatedly failed to properly pull my arms back in the “catch” position. My wimpy arms were quivering under the teeny amount of weight Teresa had given me. After I half-assed about 20 reps, I switched with Betsy and dejectedly watched her adjust the tension and hammer out a ton of swim strokes with perfect form. I wish I had Betsy’s triceps. But I don’t. I have Mr. Burns-esque triceps.

After 45 minutes of non-stop triceps abuse, I headed home to shower and get ready for work. I knew I’d be in trouble when I could already feel the soreness of my arms a couple hours after the class ended. Sure enough, the next day I felt like Ralphie’s brother from A Christmas Story, only instead of not being able to put my arms down, I couldn’t raise them more than halfway. I was rockin’ John McCain arms the entire weekend. Showering was hell, pulling my hair back was hell, rolling on deodorant was hell, changing shirts was hell. Jason quickly got tired of hearing my agonized shrieks whenever he’d try to hug, squeeze, or otherwise vaguely touch my arms and lats:

[Jason and I are laying on the couch watching TV. He adjusts his weight and brushes up against my arm.]

Me: “Aghhhhhhh, don’t do that!”
Jason: “What?”
Me: “You hit me!”
Jason: “I barely touched you!”
Me: “Well it hurt! Don’t do that!”
Jason: “You’ve got to be kidding me…”
Me: “Seriously, I am so sore…so, you’re coming to the class with me next week, right?”

You know how some people are like “I love feeling sore after a workout! It’s so satisfying!”? Well, I’m all for post-workout soreness but this was just obscene. Seriously. Friends don’t let friends get that sore. (I’m looking in your direction, Teresa.) Anyway, even though I got my ass kicked and my wimpy arms got bitch-slapped left and right, I’m determined to take the class every week to strengthen up and hopefully shave some minutes off my swim time. If nothing else then at least maybe I’ll be able to do a frickin’ pull up by the end of the season (wanna help me with that, T?).

I entered the dimly lit yoga room about a minute after the class started. It was full of men and women who were sitting cross-legged on yoga mats. I panicked when I thought it was BYOM (Bring Your Own Mat) but then saw a stack of extras in the corner of the room. After grabbing a mat, I picked an open spot on the floor and sat down…then I stood back up and kicked off my socks and shoes when I realized that everyone else was barefoot. (Seriously, what is with yoga and Pilates being barefoot requisite? The only exercise I’m used to doing sans shoes is swimming.)

The yoga instructor was giving us pleasant-sounding instructions amid the New Age music and the white Christmas lights. She kept flicking her eyes over to me, having noticed the Outsider vibes I was giving off. I don’t blame her for staring — I was the only person in the room wearing a tank top and exercise shorts, so I must have looked downright nutty compared to the fashionable yogaphiles in leg warmers, almost pants, and off-the shoulder sweaters. I felt like I was in a room full of Flashdance extras.

We started the class off with a few minutes of meditation. The instructor told us to close our eyes and just “relax and let the day’s events melt away.” I found that it was difficult to close my eyes and relax while loud trash talking permeated the room from the adjacent basketball court. It’s not easy to ignore repeated shouts of “AGHHHHH!” and “Not in MY house!” Somehow, everyone else in the room managed to close their eyes and appeared to go to their happy places while I looked around and gawked at them. (I do the same thing at dinners whenever the family insists on saying grace before we eat.)

From there we did a lot of stretchy stuff and pretended to be various animals. In the course of an hour I was a dog, an alligator, a snake, an eagle, a “happy baby,” and other creatures. It’s like we were starring in our own version of Michael Jackson’s Black or White video. (Speaking of the “dog” moves, whenever the instructor told us to “get in the up dog position,” I resisted the urge to cheekily say “What’s up dog?” in hopes that she’d respond with “Not much, what’s up with you?” I’m such a dork.) I kept up with the moves while stifling chicken quesadilla burps and silently cursing myself for eating Mexican for lunch.

At the end of the workout the instructor had us lay flat on the ground and close our eyes while she went around the room and “adjusted” people. I laid there and found out that “getting adjusted” consisted of her walking over to me and holding my legs up in the air for a few seconds, then gently placing them back on the floor. I’m not sure what the purpose of these adjustments are other than to realign my chi or something. Maybe my aura looked crooked.

Overall, yoga wasn’t too shabby. I felt it was mostly easy, with only a couple of poses that were difficult. I can see the benefit of doing yoga once a week or so for stretching purposes. The class was palatable — the hippie factor was at a minimum (minus the trendy outfits and New Age music) and the instructor’s annoyance level pinged low. The only eye-rolling thing I remember was when she told us to “picture all those toxins escaping from your organs.” I imagine this is why people think it’s acceptable to rip farts during class…