Last week, Chris Tran, aka Mr. No Post to his blog, came to Birmingham on a Thursday night to see if I wanted to go do some yoga. Some of you may know that I started doing a little Pilates from an earlier post. This yoga was kinda like Pilates, but more Korean style. When I say Korean style, I mean hot! Not the kind of hot that kimchi is, or the kind of hot my girlfriend is, but the hot like in a porta potty in a desert in the summer at noon. Yeah, they call this Bikram Yoga.

Basically, they create a steam room and you do stretching and balancing exercises in it. We got to the place and the room was a steamy 90+ degrees. It wasn’t too hot when we first started, but then they made us do the 26 poses of Bikram Yoga. I would tell you the names, but they all sound like curries I’ve eaten. Tran and I were looking forward to this, him more than me. He had already done it 4 times in California and has some goal to do it twice a month. Birmingham is the closest place for him to do it. I was just tagging along for the ride. Tran told the teacher that he had done it before, so she could just focus on my ineptness.

We were going pretty well, but then we got to the lamb ranganosh pose and something terrible happened. I look over at Tran and he has decided to sit down due to the heat. It’s pretty excessive. I’m breaking a nice sweat and aching to just wipe my brow. But apparently that would be wasting time I could be in the pose. Tran reaches for his water and tries to unscrew the cap. “WE DON’T DRINK WATER WHILE EVERYONE ELSE IS IN A POSE!!!”, the teacher sternly told Tran. Tran, then put the water back beside him. He then proceeded to pass out. I was shocked and just stayed in my pose. I was concerned, but the teacher caught his freshly shaved body as he fainted. He twitched on the ground and they eventually revived him. They allowed him to have some water and Tran recovered. He sat up and I thought he should go back into the cooler room, but he was a trooper and stuck it out. He even did some more of the exercises. He was a beast of a man, but I saw him stumble.

The rest of the exercises I just kinda tried to do a little correct, tried to not fart too loudly, and watched to see if Tran would fall again. Basically, I survived the experience. It was like the Grand Canyon adventure, only shorter. That’s how I survived it. I had a nice frame of reference. I figure anyone who really wants to do this all the time, probably hates themselves at some level and enjoys torturing themselves. I don’t know if I hate myself enough to do it again. I think I hate myself in the way that I put myself into a situation where escape is not just a few feet away. I really like to be in tough situations… but that’s another story.