A dozen 60 day challenges

This year yet again, the following sequence of events happened..

1. BYSJ announced the 60 day yoga challenge to start Jan 1st-Jan 14th (start within that window and finish 60 classes in 60 days)

2. Started on Jan 1st, and having gone to class everyday till 6th, signed up 

3. Wife and resident kid protested at first

4. Then realized that once I sign up for something, it is not easy to unsign me for anything

5. Negotiations were done as part of letting me go through the challenge

Go through this routine the first week of January as though it is some kind of WTO or Davos type event, without the private helicopters and fancy locations..

An agreement was reached. I was not to skip any of the all day hikes planned for Jan/Feb and will do doubles to make up, but it will kept to a minimum number of days.

The questions this year were :

You have done this so many times already. you are doing yoga practically every day, so why bother with this challenge?

It is not like you are going to learn anything new after all these years? You better know everything if you have been doing it this long, so just go reguarly but skip this challenge!

First question sounds logical. the second one, oh... that gave me an opening to launch into Sundar's yoga memorial lecture. On any day, I learn something new in yoga class, either about myself on a general basis, myself specific to that day, yoga in general, or something specific about a particular asana. It is a never endiing, continous process. 

Finished the challenge with 4 doubles. There were 4 all day hikes and some of them 10-12 miles with a lot of elevation gain. If there were 6:30 PM classes on Saturday, would have still dragged my ass to Yoga class after those hikes and avoided the doubles.  It was more of a time thing than a capability issue. It was a great feeling to finish. 

The 60 day challenge helps me take any new learning and make a habit out of it. When you learn something new about a part of your body, or a pose or how to adjust to do the pose better, it is important to keep repeating that, at least 10-12 days in a row, for it to stick to your brain so you do it without thinking about it as a "correction".  

It is like remembering Chennai phone numbers when they suddenly added an extra number in front of the 7 digit numbers. You have to think of the original number, add the extra number in front before dialing.. that takes mental bandwidth and slows you down.. it takes a few years of dialing before you don't have to process through those steps and the 7 digit numbers have been overwritten in the head directly with 8 digit numbers. There is no quick "Find all" , "replace all" for my brain! Maybe I am alone in this..

Yoga is like that for me. Have gone to class 2500+ times. Most of the poses are two sets per class. So if you have tried something 5000+ times over 11+ years and they have all gone through multiple sets of corrections, there has to be a faster way to make these updates stick. 

A friend and teacher, Matt told me recently when I quoted "Practice makes perfect!", with "Sundar, you get good at whatever you practice! You practice something that makes it better, you will get better. You practice something  that makes it worse, you WILL get better at making it worse!"

I just was zapped thinking about it. Bad habits are as easy to form, if you work hard! We should scrap that stupid proverb and replace it with "You perfect what you practice!". 

The 60 day challenge is the perfect opportunity to make process improvements (yoga is a process) into habits. Made 4 improvements in this challenge. Two were just undoing bad things that had crept up over time (this happens, don't know why!) and two were new learnings. 

San also signed up for the challenge with me, just to see how far she goes. She did 45/60 and was happy for her. There were two days where the little one was not well or wanted company and they both let me go to yoga. For that and for all the support, silent eye rolling instead of open rebellion, I am grateful to both of them!

Ironically, we had to wear a mask till the last day of the challenge and the very next day, the county declared masks were optional! Did all the 60 classes in the studio, in full heat and humidity, with a mask and without a water bottle.

If you are one of those folks who think it is difficult to do the hot yoga with a mask, do it back to back every day, have worries about having to remove masks to drink water etc.. all of those can be overcome.  That WAS going to be my message.. but now that the mask mandate is gone, just come do yoga!

It has been 4 years since I drank water during a yoga class. One of those things that has become a habit. Has definitely helped minimize stomach bloating during class and compress my stomach a lot more during forward bends. The first 3 days was hard.. then you count day 10, day 100, a year, two years and after some time, just get used to it and when you cross that day on calendar, smile and keep moving. This year I didn't even notice my "no water anniversary" till a few days later. That is when I know, it is time to stop counting for that one!

Have another thing to share that was funny and profound that happened during this challenge. Before a class, we were chatting with a few newcomers. They tell me "You do a great job in the front row. You must be naturally flexible!". Both me and San were smiling after hearing that.  

When I was new to Yoga, used to think that everyone else in that room was naturally flexible and was born with some genes that I lacked for sure. My first class I bent down to try touch my toes and my hands went an inch past my knees. Fast forward 12 years, someone thinks that I am naturally flexible!  

That shows, practiced skill can give the same perception as natural talent. It takes a long long time, but eventually you can get to a certain level of skill with practice. I am planning to do that with music. It doesn't matter if I have any music genes or not.. just going to keep at it and see after a dozen years, what happens. Music and yoga are different.. and I don't know the relative time scales, but going to give it a shot! When the family reads this, their eyes might just roll off the socket.. oh well!

Got another T-shirt this year at the challenge party, to replace the one that is almost dropping off my shoulder from all that washing. Very happy with it.  

Made a lot of new friends this year as well. While I was not fortunate to become a yoga teacher, definitely happy to be a longtime student. If you are one of those people who is curious about trying hot yoga, do reach out. There is plenty of posts in this blog that have explained my journey and experiences over the years and will be glad to share it in person. 

Now, we have until next Jan to negotiate a challenge! You have to keep the benchmarks going.. told my family, it would be good to do a 1000 classes, just in 60 day challenges (that is 17 challenges). So if that goal is accepted, the next 5 are spoken for!

See, simple!

Same Same but Different

Every year, Bikram Yoga San Jose has a 60 day Challenge that starts in January. This year, I got into the Challenge reluctantly, knowing that there were three possible Asia trips in those 60 days. 

The teachers said "sign up and see how far you go. you never know". Well, they know me, alright! Once they put my name on that board (twice), it was not going to be easy to give up on the challenge. 

It was a torment. I would come back from a trip and look at my star stickers trailing behind the rest of the stars and "sigh" audibly before entering the class. My biggest challenge was accepting the possibility that I might not do 60 classes in 60 days. 

With a lot of encouragement from San and the kids as well as the teachers, and a lot of doubles (do two classes in one day, sometimes back to back) the stars all added up to 60! Finished the challenge and was off to catch a 12 hour flight. 

Given my sanity is constantly tested by a workload that fluctuates by the hour, working across multiple timezones to a point where I am constantly awake, the yoga has definitely helped me from going postal. 

This is not my first challenge. It is my third (fourth if you count the fact that MIL and me did 91 classses in our first 100 days of starting Bikram Yoga in 2011.. back then we did not know much about this Challenge).

Have written about this experience in 2013 and 2014. Went back to the blog and was missing the 2015 post. Looks like I did the usual graphs and charts, wrote about it and never hit the Publish button, thanks to fighting strange rashes that come with frequent travel?! right after the Challenge.

People call me a "technologist".. I am turning into a "technoyogist". What kind of technoyogi does a post on Yoga that involves counting to 60, without graphs and charts?! 

That kind of sums up the whole challenge. It was not steady progress like the previous two years. It was stop and go. Practiced 6 times between leaving work on Friday to coming back on Monday. My original thought was that I would be dead before Monday morning, but reality was something else. Went to work and felt great. So the number of classes you do over a weekend doesn't matter, as long as you hydrate and rest properly. Zico coconut water was and is my best friend now. If some day, I put a bar in the house for some strange reason, it will only have Zico on tap. 

Then came the surprise after the Challenge. Picked up some strange rash and most of March was a wash with work, with family and Yoga. My extended family often challenged me with things like "you do all this yoga and still get sick. maybe it is the yoga!" .. friends were talking about "yoga overdose".. and once the jokes and jibes start, the hits just keep on coming.

Doing yoga does not make you invincible. It helps you optimize your strength vs. flexibilty, makes sure your hormone glands are all firing right, and helps with your immunity so your body can fight things better. My auto immune disorder and allergies are known to everyone close to me. You bring me close to a range of things like dogs,  cats, sesame seeds, peanuts, chinese juniper, shellfish (and a long list of things) and I can go from normal to strugling in a few seconds. My body probably did a better job fighting the rash, thanks to Yoga. 

Can I prove it? No. Can I disprove it? again, No.  The Yogis in the Himalayas had a much better deal than me, because they didn't have to share recirculated air in a tin can with 400 people for 12-14 hours on a regular basis.  This was like wearing a bullet proof vest and walking into a war zone. Chances are you still get shot in the face. 

The same thing applies to the sudden outburst of emotion when I am on a call and one of my kids screams in the background. Just because you do Yoga, doesn't mean you become a stoic overnight or you become a stoic ever. There is nothing wrong with going from zero to angry in 4 seconds. What is important is how long does it take you to come from Angry to zero? if you can do it in three deep breaths with 6 seconds in and 6 seconds out (24 seconds) you got me beat. That is my bench mark today. It takes me 24 seconds (20 sometimes) to calm down from anything. That is all thanks to Yoga.

The weight tracking after every yoga class is still on. Somehow I have either put on a good 10 pounds between July to December of 2014 or the battery change in the weighing scale has reset the calibration! Will post this graph at the end of 2015 and see what it shows. Right now the weight is more or less steady at 145 +/- 2 lbs. 

Why do this Challenge at all?

Is it to feed the type A personality trait?

Is it some kind of death wish?

Is there any difference that I noticed after the 2nd and 3rd challenge ?

What did I gain by doing this?  

Did I even enjoy doing this?

Those were the most common questions I got in water cooler conversations or at kids birthday parties when the guys or ladies are talking about my Yoga experience.

So here are some answers.

The first time I did the challenge, it was purely a "type A" thing. No shame in admitting it. Everyone at the studio was going "ooh" and "aah" about how great this experience was and someone mentioned that this is "not easy" and "not everyone can do it". Well, "I am not everyone" was the theme in my life at that time.. (okay, it is a repeating theme) and we went. (we = me and my mother in law, who is a type A+ personality, who encouraged me to do it. As my only "local parent", she did the right thing and I am forever grateful to her for doing that).

When the challenge was done though, it was a humbling experience, not a power trip. It put a lot of things in perspective. One can accomplish a lot at work and home, but how far can you push your body, within a two feet by six feet space, that we call a yoga mat? Once you do the same thing regularly and continuously, your body kind of starts remembering things and you start seeing changes. I always thought this concept of "muscle memory" was a bunch of bull. I was wrong! My abs never looked better than after that 60 days. 

The second time, I signed up, because January to March is Flu season here. The previous year, I had successfully managed to evade the flu, in spite of everyone in the house having it. Thought of the Challenge as a flu beater and it did help. My work was crazy in 2014 and at the time and the challenge kept me sane.

This time the learning was different. No two challenges are alike. Different year, different set of issues that have to be overcome. Also realized that poses that were not favorites the previous year, became my "look forward to" poses in the next year and vice versa.  It just shows how your body changes over time. At the end of this challenge I really wanted to ask my teacher if she will write me a recommendation for teacher training. My family and collegues nicely reminded me of my commitments, and I put that wish in the "after this job is done" list.

This year, it was probably a type A thing as well. I was fighting with myself and I won. Could not accept the thought of not finishing after signing up. Do not know if that is a good or bad thing. Sometimes I do not like the me, that stares back from the mirror. Do not understand why it is acceptance of that person that I seek, instead of a determined fight to change that person. Maybe that is the first step to eventually changing?

If you have done the challenge multiple times, the biggest changes you will see, are with your breath and your thought process. The poses are not going to magically improve because you do the challenge. Not in depth anyways. Your form will improve but that is something I have learnt to cherish only after many a teacher has knocked it into my pig head that "form is more important than depth". Even today, the teacher told us "going 90 miles per hour into a ditch is not the goal here. Going straight and steady at 35 miles per hour will still get you places".

If you are doing this challenge for the 2nd or 3rd or n-th time, chances are, you are a regular, and every day is a challenge for you. Still, you get to literally see your body change radically over a two month timeframe. Your core strength improves by orders of magnitude!

However, if you have just started on this journey, it is quite a treat to go through this experience. You WILL see changes with your body and your mind. 

The last question always puts a smile on my face. Do you enjoy doing this? That is a tough one. In all honesty, every class, no matter weather the starting state was one of euphoria or depresssion, ends the same way. I come out singing inside my hear in Gloria Gaynor's voice "and I .. I will survive.. and I survived that 90 minutes of fighting, with my body and my mind".

Not sure if anyone in that room actually "enjoys" it while the class is going on. Mostly folks stare at themselves with a frustrated, constipated or angry face except when the teachers crack a joke or remind people to smile. There are three ladies who are an exception to this. They always have a smile on their face. Either they are seasoned pro's, or air hostesses who cannot undo their smiles. Those are my theories.

Every Yoga class is like making mysore pak for me.  It takes forever to make it and you sweat it out in the kitchen, standing in front of a hot stove, but when you taste the sweet after it is done, it was all worth the effort! Walking back to the car after class, looking up at the sky, smelling the cold air (it is usually cold compared to the hot room) and driving back in silence knowing you are better off today than yesterday, always makes the hard work in the class, worth it.

Definitely recommend trying a Challenge. There is a good chance that you will surprise yourself with what you find out about your own abilities! 

The downside to counting..

When we were kids, my brother and myself had to go to Hindi class and pass exams to prove our proficiency in Hindi. Why our mom thought that two kids in south India had to go do this outside of their school curriculum was beyond me, but it sure helped later when I ended up studying in Varanasi! I could read, write and speak Hindi comfortably..

One of the lessons that I vaguely remember is "निन्यानबे के चक्कर में" (which crudely translates to "stuck in circles at 99") where a guy loses his peace of mind because he loses 1 of his 100 gold coins and instead of being content with the knowledge he still has 99 coins, he keeps chasing the one lost coin.

The last two weeks reminded me of this story constantly. You see, at the beginning of the year, there was the 60 day challenge for Yoga (60 classes in 60 days) which was done successfully, with a lot of help and encouragement from family and friends. There was a goal to try and keep it going for a longer time.. 100 day challenge? 365 day challenge? Did not want this to be a new year resolution where the drive to keep on going is dead by Valentines day, and for some time it was close to being an 80/80 and then things started falling off.. when San went to China and the MIL went back to Seattle and allergies caught up with me etc. etc. excuses.. excuses!

As is customary in my head.. when your original goal is becoming too distant, a short term goal sometimes helps getting back on track. So told myself.. at least finish 100 classes by end of April! Things were going okay, but the closer it got, there were some unnecessary mental blocks to the point where on day 100, decided to deliberately take a break. 

So here is the nerdyogi's graph for 2013.. will put this up after 240 days and see how it goes. The way things are, might be recreating this chart from PhD comics.. or not?!

Did make it to 100th class this year on day 122 and continuing to go for classes whenever possible. 

Now this has made me think.. As an example, if a cricket player was asked to just keep scoring with no scoreboard in front of him, will he score more without worrying about critical landmarks like 50 runs or 100 runs etc. Would we drive towards a long term goal better if we didn't have to see those in between mile markers all the time? Is there some research on this topic? If you have read any books or have seen research on this topic, do let me know.

Maybe intermediate milestones are more of a block? 

From Pranayama to Kapalbhati - A nerds eye view

March 5th 2013 was a special day. If my life were to flash past my eyes that day will definitely be on that flashback!

The San Jose Bikram Yoga center had a challenge. Do Yoga 60 times in 60 days. The idea was to come every day. But if you had to miss a day for travel or other reasons, you take a class in that location or do a makeup class the same week. I had originally misinterpreted the Challenge to be 60 days in 10 weeks. That meant one rest day a week. Later found out that it was 60 days 60 classes. No rest day!

Given my once a week trip for work, was doubting my ability to go take up this challenge. With a lot of encouragement from San and the kids as well as my co-workers and the entire BYSJ community, signed up on Jan 5th. March 5th was day 60! March 5th was also class 60!

It was a roller coaster ride where the body and mind went through more than a few challenges. Hot Yoga is not a new thing in this family now. On March 11th, it will be two years since the day MIL and myself attended our very first Bikram Yoga class. Even in our best stretch of 91 days attendance in our first 100 days, we took breaks every now and then. There was the day or two where we said "let's not push it. we can go tomorrow". That determination to go to class when you are slightly sore from an outing with the wife and kids or when you ate dinner at some restaurant with co-workers and it doesn't agree with your stomach or you just drove past Sacramento and back between 6AM and 5PM with one long meeting thrown in and came in to a Yoga class at 6:30 PM so you don't miss a day.. was simply not there in any previous streches of doing Yoga.

When we first started Bikram Yoga, our weight was dropping every day, we were becoming stronger and more flexible, our skin was glowing.. the benefits were visible and measurable and obvious to everyone around us. So just the fact that people around you notice positive changes keeps you going. After you go for a few years, the changes are incremental. Every few weeks or so, you manage to reach a new level in one of the poses or your body and mind work together to realize that you have been interpreting the teachers words slightly off and correct for it. In short, slow and steady progress. Fortunately being a Six Sigma person and having run a Fab, yours truly understands the value of Continuous Improvement and that helps a lot!

It is more of a metal challenge to do 60 classes in 60 days. Once you manage to get up at 4:45, get ready, drive to the Yoga studio, spread that mat and lie down to savor the heat, you realize that you will have a great class.  Making it to the room is the hard part. Doing the Yoga after that is like hot fudge! (Not a big fan of icing on cakes if you can't tell by now).

There were so many days in the last 60 that either tested my physical strength or resolve where San or the kids or most importantly my MIL (who has been coming with me to Yoga class the last 17 days) would say "Don't you dare give up now!" San even let me go to evening class for a lot of days and said "I will take care of both the kids routines. Just go.. and I am letting you do this only because you are doing the challenge and you have come so far!" and I accepted her offer with tears in my eyes. The challenge did some funny stuff to the head too and I would get all emotional and weepy, especially between day 45 to 60!

The challenge was also well documented in Excel to see if the stats would tell me something or let me share anything with the rest of the world. . .

First things first. If you do take a challenge like this, it might not be a bad idea to take two classes on weekends in same day just to compensate for future misses..

If that strategy had not been adopted, it would have been a good reason for the mind to say "no way to catch up now.. so drop it!"

There was a self imposed goal to track how the classes actually went, just to see if the energy level stayed flat, increased, decreased, tracked the lunar cycle.. just wanted to see what the data showed, especially after hearing from other folks who said that one starts sitting down for a lot of poses towards the middle of the challenge.

Now for the weight tracking. It was more of an afterthought to track weight on a daily basis. One thing I learned over this weighing process is that when you drink two 500mL bottles of water within an hour after you finish class, that is 2.2 lbs. Started to measure exactly an hour after class and that showed good tasty food does correlate to a baseline weight change!

When you track stuff and enter a few things every day on a spreadsheet before going to bed, you can actually have some fun trying to stare at the data..

There was a stretch where the classes in general were intense and there was one weekend where a 10 year anniversary class had a record 100+ people in the room. It was more of a communal event than a class and I did push myself way past my limits and that correlated to the low weight and the 4 missed poses the next day. Other than that there are many factors that are not charted that could be reasons for the red bars.. One good thing? Managed to do the 60 classes without missing more than 26 poses.

Even tracked the count by teacher. The list was 20 strong and the count ranged from 6 to 1. Do have favorites within the 30+ teachers and my favorites are different from the MIL's favorites. MIL and me classify teachers into three groups. The fire breathing dragons who push you past your limits just with their voice, the horsewhisperers who get you into a trance and make you do what they say and teachers who are a combination of both. They push you during the pose and calm you down with their voice when you are in relax mode.  While I love the dragons, the MIL prefers the horsewhisperers. Maybe it is an age or personality thing.. End of the day, have a lot of teachers to thank, for encouraging and watching out for what I do in class and giving me suggestions to improve my practice!

When we ask a lot of folks we meet regularly after class "Did you sign up for the challenge?" the answer is "No. I come 2-3 times a week regularly anyways. So don't see any reason to do this 60 day thing!".  I used to go a lot more "regularly" and still, this was a great eye opener. If you are doing Bikram Yoga and your studio has a 60 day challenge, TAKE IT! Why?

1. There are a lot of poses that I was stuck at with a certain level or step. Have managed to get past those points during this challenge. Do not know if it has something to do with the ability to form muscle memory when you go without a break of more than a day, but the end result is obvious. Maybe you will get past those sticky points.

2. It is not easy to prioritize Yoga over other things. Need a high level of dedication to go pull it off and you get to test your ability to do a good thing for yourself above other things. Kind of makes you realize that the most important thing in your life, is "your life"!

3. Your whole family might cheer for you and support you. San, the kids and the MIL who joined me for the last 15 classes.. which was the most difficult streach, supported me like never before! They have also never openly said "I am proud of you" under any circumstance in recent times and hearing them say that was worth the effort.

4. Finally, you realize that you can actually pull it off and it was not an unrealistic goal as you originally thought! Realizing you are made of tougher stuff (mentally and physically) than you thought is a great reward in itself.

Then again, if you are a nerd you might also have some fun staring at Yoga graphs for a change...

ps. Will post pictures next week of the new and improved Shaolin monk looking me..

Free rice

If you are sick and recovering and you are alone in the middle of the night, checking emails, catching up on work, bloghopping, and you come across a great site (thanks to Adengappa and Porcupyn)that :

a. keeps you occupied
b. is a charity that feeds the poor

it is a win-win situation!

Go ahead, try it!

http://www.freerice.com/

All those years of studying for the GRE using the olds Baron's Guide came in handy!

I was going great guns till the word "gelt" stopped me dead in my tracks. (I had made one mistake on the way and the system gave me a few tougher words before it let me get back to the same level). I also lucked out once because I had narrowed the answer to one of two choices and I used Jr.'s algorithm,

aka

eenie, meenie, miney mo
catch the tiger by the toe!

Now, you can wake me up at 3:00AM in the morning and ask me "what does gelt mean?" and I will instantly say "Money"!, that is if I am not already awake at 3:00 AM!

Glad I found this site!

ps. We are all doing much better today than yesterday.

Thanks for all your wishes! - Sundar, Sangeetha, Jr., Little one, Washer and Dryer.

.