Yoga has been a complementary practice to running for me for years. The most fit I ever felt was when I simultaneously trained for a marathon while completing a 30-day yoga challenge at my studio of choice, Cityoga in Indianapolis. Given all the ways yoga has benefited my health and running—the stretching of my calves and ankles in down dogs, the core strengthening, the balance moves working all the little tendons and toes, the calm and focus—I didn’t expect to get even more from it. Yet here it is, surprising me in a new, unexpected way.
Recently, I’ve been hitting hill training hard to prepare for Boston. I love hills, but there are days when I need a little something extra to ramp up the effort. It was on such a day when a familiar prompt popped into my mind. While pushing up a 14.6% grade incline at Crown Hill Cemetery, I found myself out of the blue saying: knee to nose, knee to nose.
This is a prompt I’ve heard a million time in yoga classes, but here it was in a new context. Isolating the movements from the bottom half of this pose just clicked for me. As I repeated those words, I locked in to better form, using my core and driving my knees to fly faster up that hill. This made me wonder what else I might borrow from yoga.
An answer did not come straight away. Then, one day I found myself running with a lot of tension in my upper body. Shoulders scrunched up, tight neck, teeth clenched. Initially I said to myself: let your legs do the work, relax up top.
My mind traveled to countless moments on the mat preparing for Savasana with a lion’s breath, where you inhale deeply, open wide, stick out your tongue, and exhale forcefully in one big aaaaaaahhh! The simple act of releasing my tongue from the roof of my mouth and parting my lips (one instructor I’ve practiced with says to visualize a grain of rice between the lips) has a ripple effect, melting tension from my jaw. That feeling flows to my neck and beyond. A couple of simple cues, and suddenly my face and arms relaxed.
Visualizations and mantras are personal. I have no idea if these might work for others, yet yoga offers so much fertile ground. I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me until now to tap into what I have learned from my practice in this way. But of course it is a process and a journey. We can’t learn everything at once, but we can continue down the path with openness to the lessons yet to come.