Yoga Teacher Training Weekend Two

Our second weekend of yoga teacher training kicked off with a 90 minute astanga practice. This was my first astanga (aka ashtanga, apparently that's the Americanized spelling of it, as that's how it's pronounced) and I was really excited to dive in.



Before heading to class I had about six seconds to come home and change, and I quickly checked the mail in hopes that my new malas had arrived. My last set broke on Valentine's Day and I've been without. Yay for me, they had arrived!



All the malas belong to me!

Astanga was fun and completely different from what I'm used to. I'm incredibly intrigued by the practice and hope my studio starts to offer more classes to get more of a feel for it!

Friday night we spent a lot of time breaking down poses. In fact, we did that the bulk of the weekend. Working on cues, being succinct with those cues, modifications, deciphering the benefits of each pose, learning assists, and sequencing. My.Brain.Is.Full.

Saturday morning we started with a highly anticipated inversion class. I'm super intrigued and terrified of inversions so I was excited to learn more from a master of inversions!



The class was open to all, and we packed the room FULL! Please enjoy this horrendous photo of me. :/

Saturday was more of the same pose breakdown, as was Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon we broke up into groups to practice our memorized Surya Namaskara A & B. We were told to memorize the counting in sanskrit, the breaths and the poses. I was thrown for a bit of a loop when it came time to practice and the studio owner wasn't concerned with the sanskrit counting but was with the sanskrit poses. Cue minor panic attack. Luckily I picked it up pretty quickly because I had studied the other stuff so much the night before (thanks Kyle for being my yoga student!).

This weekend marked the 2nd of seven being complete. Now that we have 6 days and 37 hours of training under our belts, I need to focus on the additional requirements of the certification process: 30 hours of yoga practice by approved instructors, 10 hours of yoga observation by approved instructors and another 10 hours of yoga assisting with the approved instructors. If anyone needs to find me the next few months, I'll give you one hint as to where you can find me...... (I think it was a good idea to put running on the back burner this spring, right??).

Yoga Teacher Training

As you may have noticed from my spring race plan, my spring is very light on races. This is partly because of my plan to rebuild my mileage slowly while maintaining my yoga classes to keep my strength and flexibility in check (aka I'm sick of being hurt, let's finally figure this crap out, mmk).

But another huge reason that racing is taking a back seat is because I'm starting yoga teacher training this weekend! For seven weeks this spring, I'll be spending my Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays in the studio being a total yogi sponge. And I'm so freaking excited. (Wait, can Ollie come?!?! I'm going to freakin' miss her!)

I've been doing yoga on and off since 2002, and have been doing it almost daily since the Bemidji Marathon, and I'm just head over heels in love. Yoga puts me in such a happy place, and I'm excited to immerse myself in it more fully. I'm hoping that teacher training furthers my personal practice as well as allowing me to spread my love for yoga to anyone and everyone that's interested. I'd love to do some random free yoga classes in the park this summer, or help my running store offer more free classes for runners.

So that's my exciting spring!!

Sidenote: while trying to make the decision about signing up I kept coming across messages on IG that "spoke" to me. This was one of them.