My first yoga session

Monday 23rd January 2017

Club la Santa, Lanzarote 

We managed to get up in time for Morning Gymnastics today. This is a Club la Santa tradition going back about 30 years, which involves everyone who wants to gathering round and doing choreographed aerobics and various stretches for 15 minutes, to a soundtrack that has apparently been the same for the whole 30 years! The call to prayer begins with Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and then goes on to include Chariots of Fire, plus a few other instrumental songs that Claire is desperately trying to identify so she can play them every morning at home. No, I'm not joking. There are numerous videos on YouTube if you're interested. 

I wish we'd made the effort every day, as it was a good way to start the morning, and a good warm up for our run. We'd decided to go running along the same trail we cycled down yesterday. It was only a short run (60 minutes) but it was a bit more of a struggle than usual, especially for Claire after her intervals session the day before. However, I have since found out that she was stopping to take selfies, which probably explains why she kept falling behind. 

 

I was wearing my Adidas trainers, instead of my new Hoka trainers, and could tell the difference straight away. The Hokas are designed to be mega cushioned, to minimise impact and therefore injury. I hadn't realised before today what a good job they were doing. My knee was hurting a bit when we got back, which I put down to the change of shoes.

After a late breakfast we headed off to yoga. I had never done yoga before, but I managed okay I think. Our instructor lived up to my stereotype of a yoga instructor, by being endlessly flexible and having one of those soothing voices that made you think that you were good at yoga, even if you were terrible. More by luck than judgement, I had managed to position myself near someone who was even less flexible and even worse at balancing than me! And I'm not talking about Claire. The session lasted for an hour, during which we did some really good stretches of just about every body part, but especially hips and hamstrings. My favourite part was the last 5 or 10 minutes when we had to lie on our yoga mats in the sun and relax. I could have stayed there all day. 

We eventually got ourselves down to the swimming pool in the afternoon, to put the GoPro to work filming each other swimming. This is so we can compare our videos with animated videos I have of ideal swimming technique. I was not sure how much help this would be, but having reviewed our recordings, it is probably the most useful thing I have ever done to try and improve my swimming. I could see straight away that I was holding my head too high, and lifting it out of the water far too much to breathe. Plus various other things. I won't bore you with the videos, but here's a still from one of them. What is my hand doing all the way out there??

 

We had hoped to get onto the Aerial Relaxation session this afternoon, which is like Aerial Yoga, but without the yoga. Unfortunately it was fully booked, so we settled for relaxing with some beers instead. 

Tomorrow we have booked mountain bikes from 8am to 3pm and are heading the other way along the coast towards the volcano national park. It is our last day here tomorrow, so you can expect a grumpy tone to the final blog.