Sometime before 2024, I started going to a Mindful Flow yoga class at the climbing gym. It was fine; dim lights, deep breathing, sort of a stretching hour—as hopeless as that feels for someone with tight hips from a lifetime of running. I hoped some stretching might help control the injuries that prevent me from running like I used to and that improved hip mobility might help my climbing.
I started attending more regularly throughout 2024. It was still a big challenge to sit cross-legged for more than a few seconds without tipping backwards. Downward-facing dog was a stress position. Some of the namaste stuff was[1] a little off-putting.
I’ve reconstructed my class history in the timeline below. I didn’t start tracking any of this until much later when I figured out the climbing gym exposes a GraphQL endpoint for historical bookings. Looking back, I’m surprised at my consistency because I remember cancelling on multiple nights when I couldn’t stomach sitting there quietly with myself for an hour. I’m not sure my flexibility improved much.
Mindful Flow Mondays continued into 2025. The moment things changed was in April, when my partner left on travel for three months. I started attending Monday-Wednesday-Friday yoga, met some regular climbing partners at the gym, and after ten years of almost exclusive solo running, started attending the Bay Bandits trail running club.
I wasn’t just trying to fill the time. I’ve learned, slowly and from repeated failures, that isolation causes me to spiral inward. Being around other people in a structured way disrupts that pattern. Yoga put me in a familiar place, in the presence of fellow humans, but without requiring much social performance.
This continued for the next three months until July, when my partner returned home. Returning to a more normal routine was a fork in the road, so in July, having re-aggravated my plantar fasciitis from running too much, I opted to start attending daily yoga.
The environment was also a nice change. Almost my entire adult life has been spent in places where I am the default: white, male, working in software or engineering. In yoga, I’m often unsure of myself, sometimes literally and figuratively out of place. The only obvious thing people really have in common is that they showed up to struggle for an hour, which is nice.
Certainly one thing that has contributed to my attendance record is when I started attending Jody Hahn’s classes. The wrong instructor focuses your attention on your limitations[2]. The right instructor focuses your energy on what’s accessible to you. In the unlikely event she’s reading this, hey Jody 👋. Gosh, she’s a great instructor. She said she’d received at least one bad Yelp review for providing too much assistance, but her attention to detail is precisely the thing that finally tipped the scales and helped me feel at home rather than out of my element in the yoga studio.
In aggregate, and apart from some traveling, I’ve transitioned from attending about once per week to about five times per week.
So I guess the obvious question is whether it’s had any effect, whether I’m flexible or good at yoga now or something.
Not really. I feel stronger. A lot of that is probably just figuring out the technique. I can sit cross-legged for an extended period of time, though not comfortably. Downward-facing dog is alright while malasana is my new stress position. I started attending a handstands class, and on a good day, I can manage about 8-10 seconds free-standing. Plenty of basic hamstring– and hip-intensive poses are still completely inaccessible to me. I’m skeptical that improved mobility, if it ever materializes, is likely to help my climbing.
The thing I like though is that I don’t particularly care about the result. The part that keeps me coming back day to day is the process, seeing slow measures of progress even if my ability in some absolute sense will probably always remain painfully elementary. I easily fall into the trap of analyzing meaning to the point of paralysis. Historically, I could pour my energy into running without questioning the meaning. Yoga fills that role for me at the moment, a place to focus my energy without worrying about why. It’s not the meaningful thing for me, but it’s a meaningful thing. In the coming year, I’m considering going to class less and working in some more self-guided practice. But until then, I have tomorrow’s class scheduled, and I plan to keep it up.