Date Night–Get Fit Slowly Style

Last night, after date night, I sat down to write this post and to continue making changes to the site design.  I had one of those “uh-oh” moments when I got an error message from my server immediately after I had saved a change.  (To those commenters who’ve been offering feedback, I am listening and making SOME of the requested changes)  I thought that I screwed up the entire site and would have to start my redesign all over again.  So I fired off an email to my webhosting company and went to bad all miffed.  Needless to say, I woke up this morning and everything was fine, but this post didn’t get put up because I couldn’t access my server for a bit.

Yesterday was an awesome day.  The only bad thing about it was that I didn’t get my 10-mile day in:  I only managed six.  The day started off with my mom dropping me off at the golf course.  While I was golfing with a friend, she dropped the kids off at school, went back home to strip wallpaper, picked the kids up from school and took them to lunch.  How nice was that?

In the afternoon, while the kids were sleeping, my mom continued to strip wallpaper and I worked outside:  spreading cedar chips around the kids play structure, mowing the lawn, and thinking about the potential of our back yard.

Here’s where the day really starts to get good though.  My mom volunteered to watch the kids, feed them dinner and put them to bed so that Pam and I could go out.  I picked her up from work and we headed to dinner for a good meal and some great conversation.  During the dinner I was thinking to myself that we haven’t talked like this in a while, and Pam actually said how nice the conversation was and that we need to go out more.  Instead of the normal talk about the mundane aspects of our life that need to be talked about at the family dinner table, we talked about the things that we were interested in talking about.  It was great.

After dinner, we headed to the gym to finish off our date!  I arrived first and went for a 2-mile treadmill run (4 miles golfing +2 miles running =6 miles of movement for the day)  Instead of completing my 6 mile run, Pam and I took a yoga class together.

Pam has been sporadically attending the Tue/Thur yoga class at our gym for the last few months.  She doesn’t make it very often because it’s at a terrible time for our family (right around bed time) and I’ve never been.  But since my mom offered to babysit, we decided to seize the opportunity and go to yoga together.

Let me just say that YOGA WAS AMAZING!  At first I felt like a total fish out of water.  I felt tight and unathletic.  During the 1-hour-session, Pam and I exchanged a few glances.  Her glances at me said, “get ready because this next part is hard!” and mine back at her said, “Damn, that was hard!”  It seemed as if I was always 2 steps behind the instructor–just as I would make it in to a certain pose, she would move on to the next one and I’d have to rush to catch up.  But this feeling quickly dissipated as I became more accustomed to the pace and the routine.

Let me just say that YOGA WAS HARD!  The class was basically divided into two sections.  The first part focused on flexibility and strength poses.  My quads and hamstrings burned throughout and the sweat just poured off of my forehead.  After only one session of yoga, I can now relate to what the contestants on The Biggest Loser feel when Bob puts them through their yoga paces.  The second part focused on balance and here, I was much better.  I found that if I focused on one spot and concentrated on breathing like the instructor suggested then it was really pretty easy for me to remain balanced in the different positions that she guided us into.

The most satisfying thing about my first experience with yoga was how much I improved over the course of one hour.   At the beginning, I didn’t feel flexible enough to get into any of the positions and towards the end those same positions were much easier for me.

After yoga, Pam and I headed home to a clean house and sleeping children.  It was a great date night–one that will have to be repeated often. Come on mom, build that dream house of yours!