January 4, 2005 - Auburn, Alabama

Once again after breakfast Helga drove us over to the fitness center. I once again started off with an hour of fast walking on the track while Monika and Helga did the water aerobics, and then we reunited for a yoga class. The yoga class had a distinctly different feel to it than either the step aerobics class or the Pilates class. The music was a soft, relaxing background music more like the music for the Pilates class than the rock and roll music with the heavy background beat used in the step aerobics class (lots of old favorites there and I had to stop myself from belting out some of the tunes while we were doing the exercises).

The instructor also had a soft, soothing voice that she modulated quite well to keep us all together. The yoga class placed far more focus on regulated breathing with each exercise, emphasizing inhaling and exhaling through the nose whereas in Pilates we were told to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, and in the step aerobics class I was just panting for breath most of the time! The positions and transitions between them were done at a much more relaxed pace, but I still managed to work up a bit of a sweat due to holding my body in quite a few different positions. I was amused that the positions had names like the "dog", "cat", "child", "warrior", and "tree". Those names seemed rather arbitrary to me, and I thought that more descriptive names might be useful. My names for some of our positions would have been names like "sitting pretzel", "standing stork", "twisted croissant", and "dislocated hip". On second thought, maybe those names wouldn't exactly cause people to beat a path to the class doors.

But at the very least it would have been nice to just post a chart with pictures of those positions on the wall for newcomers to look at before the class, because when I was twisted into certain positions it was impossible to crane my neck around to see exactly where the instructor had her arms, legs, and torso. When I did get a look at her, sometimes I could only laugh because her young and extremely flexible body could twist itself into positions that would dislocate some of my joints. I don't think the younger folks have much sympathy for the older, stiffer generation, but it is certainly also true that their time to be old and stiff will inevitably come. The class ended on a fully relaxing position of laying flat on my back-which is my normal position for meditating-so I really did end the yoga session much more relaxed and stretched, but probably also less aerobically exercised than after either the Pilates or step aerobics classes.

When we arrived back home after our classes, Jim surprised us with a completely prepared lunch complete with freshly baked corn bread that we both loved. We finished off the day by taking in a movie that afternoon and having dinner with Helga and Jim's daughter Natalie and her husband Matt. That gave us some time to hear about what was going on in their life and some of their plans for the future before we returned home to watch Oklahoma and USC in the Orange bowl. The game seemed to be pretty well decided by half time, so we retired so that I could work on the journal a bit before bed while Monika read one of Helga's books. The nice thing about Helga and Jim's house was that they had as many books clogging up their shelves as we do and a lot of them were in German!