Day 158

Gusty winds woke me up sporadically during the night and from my window, I can see the whitecaps on Lake Ontario. We're having some seriously weird weather here. The last two days, it was rain and now it's dangerously high winds. I went to the ice rink this morning to skate, only to find the Zamboni Guy driving the Zamboni around collecting water (every minute or so, he dumped a cascade of water off the side and it poured across the square). The rink was like a lake (which isn't too odd, since it's actually a reflecting pool with fountains in the summer months). I stopped to chat with him for a moment and gave up on the skating idea - instead, I headed home to go for a walk. It's 4C out, but we had highs of 13C this week. Weird.

I was on the mat at 5:40 a.m. for full Primary. I had a good, strong practice and a quick one too. The pushups I've been doing in my vinyasas are now second nature and I decided to revert back to more traditional vinyasa. I had no idea how much time the extra step was adding to my practice. I started 10 minutes late, dawdled a fair bit and still finished before 7.

One interesting consequence of this change is that I'm not as tired in the upper body by the time I get to the Marichyasana poses. Coming into Marichyasana C, binding to fingers just didn’t feel 'right' to me. It didn't feel stable. So I did a wrist bind on the right side and realised that I can keep myself balanced (and not feel like I'm leaning backward or lifting my foot off the floor) by engaging the arm that wraps around the leg. It felt so good (and believe me, Mari C never feels good these days), that I tried it on the left, doing the wrist bind. It was a bit more difficult than the right side, but it felt okay.

The other big surprise was backbends. My lower back felt cranky this morning (I'm on the cusp of my lady's holiday), so I assumed that Urdhva Dhanurasana would be unpleasant. It wasn't. In fact, I was able to easily hold it for five breaths each time. This seems to be happening more and more. Backbends are getting easier. I almost don't believe it.

And finally, one funny little observation: I woke this morning to soreness in my thumb mounds (from all of the 'rooting down through the thumb mound' stuff I was doing yesterday). I guess this is a part of my body that I'm just not used to engaging with any regularity! If I keep it up, I may become the 'go-to' person at the soup kitchen for bottle lids that won't open!! ;-)