30 Day Yoga Challenge ~ Conquered

I pulled out my calendar yesterday to figure out how many more days I had for my 30 day yoga challenge and realized that I only had one day left to go.  Barring any unforeseen disasters today, I should be able to check this one off my box by the time the day is done.  What an interesting month it’s been to sweat out my stress every night on the yoga mat with a commitment and dedication I didn’t know I had within me.  I’m the sort of person that’s great at starting things, but not so good at finishing sometimes.  I get bored easily and flit around from one good idea to the next. Oh, it’s just the worst with books, and it drives me crazy, but I do it nonetheless.  There’s just too many interesting things to learn and do in this world, so I have a hard time channeling my attention in one direction for too long.

But I’m glad that I can say that for at least the last 30 days I conquered my short attention span and got in some serious yoga time, not to mention five days a week of running as well.   As a deployed servicemember, there’s really only about three things to take pleasure in:  food, sleep or exercise.  For this month, at least, I chose exercise.  Because of that decision, there’s now about seven pounds less of me in the world.  One of the most interesting changes in my body after a month of daily yoga is that I have these crazy tendons or something like that on the back of my hands.  It’s like I have muscles on the back of my hands now.  Never seen that before in my life.   Having fairly well shunned the gym for a month, I’ve slimmed down a bit and noticed a redistribution of muscle mass from my arms and chest to my back and shoulders.  Incorporating abs into my daily yoga routine also yielded noticeable results, which probably would have been even more noticeable if I hadn’t succumbed on a semi-daily basis to my other new addiction:  Hot Tamales.  Don’t know that I’ll ever eat another Hot Tamale in my life when I finish my deployment, but for now if you stick a bag in front of me it disappears rather rapidly.  Oh well, I’m not perfect.  Maybe that’s why I threw the running into the mix so I could justify 600 calorie candy splurges.

As of today, I’ve certainly got a long, long ways to go with my yoga practice.  It’ll probably always be that way.  I’m not ready for a day off yet,so I’ll just keep on rolling out the mat.  I think tonight I’ll do this First Series practice from Yoga Today.