Sometime before 2024, I intermittently started attending a Mindful Flow yoga class at the climbing gym. It was fine; dim lights, deep breathing, sort of a stretching hour—as futile 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. It felt like a tiny step in the evolution of staying active as I get older.
Throughout 2024, as I started attending more regularly, I remember struggling to sit cross-legged for more than a few seconds without tipping backwards. Downward 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 simply couldn’t stomach sitting there quietly 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.
That decision wasn’t just about filling time. I’ve learned, slowly and after repeated failures, that isolation causes me to spiral inward. Being around other people in a structured way disrupted that pattern. Yoga put me in the same room with the same people, repeatedly, without requiring much social performance.
This continued for the next three months until July, when my partner returned home. My partner was more surprised than I was when, after living in our home for nearly a decade, I actually began to encounter acquaintances on the street! The return to normalcy was a fork in the road, so in July, having re-aggravated my plantar from running too consistently, I opted to start attending daily yoga.
There was also something about the environment that stood out. Most of my adult life has been spent in places where I am the default: white, male, working in software or engineering, surrounded—often without exception—by people who look and think similarly. In yoga classes, I’m often unsure of myself, sometimes literally out of place, and aware that my presence is not assumed. I’m uncomfortable, but so is everyone else. We all showed up to struggle for an hour, and there’s not much more to it than that.
Certainly one thing that has contributed to my attendance record is when I started attending Jody Hahn’s classes. The wrong instructor uses your limitations against you[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 been outstanding. 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.
I feel stronger. I can sit cross-legged for an extended period of time, though not entirely comfortably. Downward 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. There are still a number of basic hamstring– and hip-intensive poses that are completely inaccessible to me. If it ever helps my climbing, I think it’ll take at least another 5+ more years at this rate.
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 quite elementary. I’ve always been particularly susceptible to 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. It’s not the meaningful thing for me, but it’s a meaningful thing, I have tomorrow’s class scheduled, and I plan to keep it up.