How I Ended Up Taking Eight Bikram Classes in One Day

Mar 26, 2011 15:59

If i'm going to keep this around, i might as well write this up here:

The summary of what happened is that my Bikram studio had an all day challenge where folks could see how many classes they could do in one day. That's eight classes from 6 am to 10 pm. Half hour breaks between 90 min classes.

I planned on doing four, maybe five, but ended up doing all eight. Along with two others, a guy and a girl. One guy before had done seven (which is all they offered in a day then), so he was the reigning champion, but after six he decided he was done. And one guy missed the first class because he didn't know there was a 6 am class, but he did the last seven.

One thing i'm amused by is that i probably weigh as much than the two other folks who did the eight put together. And probably have a good decade on them each, too.

(But the guys who did 6 and 7 have quite a few years on me)

Diet

Going into this, this was the part that interested me: You can't really eat before doing a Bikram class. Along with the heat and the exercise, there's a lot of bending and twisting that makes food something that can take you out in class. So how do you get through 16 hours of class without eating but still having enough energy. Here's what i tried (successfully):

I drank an average of 1.5L of ice cold water during class and 12 oz of coconut water and some juice mixed with SuperFood Plus between classes.

After the second class, I think for most of the classes 750 mL of water had an Emergen-C packet dropped in, too.

In the morning i ate like 1/3 of a small banana between classes. After the fourth class i had some deli meat slices. And the fifth class felt really good, so i had a few more of those after the sixth class as well.

In the afternoon, i also had grapes and tangerines and got a little more aggressive on the water and coconut water drinking.

And i think that's about all i ate all day. At the end of the day, the manager offered me a cupcake. "It's organic!" he said, when i shuddered looking at it.

I think i went home and ate something before winding down and going to bed to dream of being instructed to do yoga poses.

I think i had one class left in me that i could have pulled out, but that was pretty much it.


Background

At the beginning of the year, i decided i was doing a "lot of yoga" challenge. In Bikram, there's an idea of a 30-day challenge (and 60, too) where you do classes every day. I have trips and stuff planned so i knew i wasn't having classes that regularly, so i just said i was going to do "a lot".

(I think it's a bit odd because, in his book, Bikram repeatedly says the thing to do when starting is to come for 60 days straight. It's not a suggestion, it's his only answer for starting So, the idea that it's some challenge that people get super excited about doing seems odd. But, having started that way, it's also not really an easy thing to pull off.)

In the middle of this, my studio announced that they were having an All Day challenge, where they would support folks who wanted to see how many classes they could take in one day by having drinks and food available. This is the second time they've done this. Last time one guy took all seven classes.

So... that seemed like it officially qualified for "a lot of yoga", and i decided i would try to take as many classes as i could that day.

Lead-up

One administrative type screw up i had with my "lot of yoga" challenge was that i bought a 90 day unlimited package and my plan was to do as much as i could in 90 days. And i would try to finish that up before a planned weeklong trip in May. However, i failed to account for the amount of classes i still had that were going to expire in May, so i basically ended up with 120+ days straight of yoga that i paid for.

This was falling about right in the middle. Which meant i would have been going daily for a couple months before that. Last time i did two months straight, i was exhausted all the time that second month.

This time, i did most of January and went camping Pres Day weekend. Then i started "training".

Training

One part of this was wearing a shirt. Most guys don't wear shirts, and women are about 50/50. So this was partially to figure out how much a difference it made for women who wore shirts, but i figured the extra heat would be good training, too.

To see how i was doing i started taking two classes at a time. That ended up kicking my ass, so i spaced it out to one class in the morning and one class in the afternoon.

That was okay, so i figured i should be able to do at least two classes in the morning and two classes in the afternoon. Maybe i'd do okay and squeeze in three on one half.

I was doing the morning and afternoon class thing a couple times a week, and then on Sunday, i'd try to take two in a row. That snow weekend, the teacher was very aggressively selling the idea of going to Mt Baldy. It made it really hard to take the second class, and i told her that. She told me to leave. Daily yoga was enough. I could do two classes any day, but now there was snow.

I stayed for the second class and then headed up to the snow. It was a lot of fun. Tromping around waist deep in snow. She was right; it needed to be done. But i'm glad i got the extra training in, too.

That was the double on Sunday before the all-day. I skipped class Monday, did one class Wednesday and then skipped Thursday.

The night before

Then, Thursday night my body kinda shut down. It decided it was super tired and didn't want to leave the couch for anything. So, instead of preparing for an all day yogathon, i just sat on the couch. Staring.

Then i went to sleep. No preparatory eating. Not even drinking of water. No meal planning for the next day. Nothing. All i had prepped was the couple things of frozen water i had put in the freezer earlier in the week.

I just went to bed. And then got up with barely enough time to run to the studio. I scrambled to get everything ready. And just ran into the car and got there exactly at 6 am.

The manager chided me for being late. Considering what was going on that day, i thought that was a bit silly. Plus normally, that 6 am class doesn't start exactly on time. So i was surprised at that.

The morning

The studio has an interesting temperature layout. The doors are on one end and there's two set of fans and heater/AC vents spaced out. It's coolest near the doors, and then directly under the fans you get a touch more air, plus you get the breeze. So the hot spots of the room are the far wall and the middle of the room.

I had a plan to slowly migrate from the far side of the room to the door. And i would start with the shirt so i could warm up a little more in the morning, but also have something for relief when i took it off.

The migration happened a bit quicker than i expected. By the third class, i was desperate for a spot closer to the doors. That's when i noticed that folks who had shown up early weren't leaving. And, in fact, it seemed like everyone was camping out near the door. Between classes none of those mats were leaving.

Apparently, there was something about claiming your spot early in the day in this game that i hadn't planned on.

But... it had gotten to the third class. And i hadn't sat out any of the postures, so i figured i might as well keep going.

For the fourth class, i sat around waiting for the right person to leave and jumped to claim the best spot i could under a fan. Which meant i was planning on pulling off all of the morning classes.

The one problem with being near the door is the front desk woman would slip in to take pictures of the class on it's challenge day and because it was so crowded. So being near the door meant being near her lens.

I didn't want to push myself super hard four classes in, but at the same time, my vanity was striking hard enough that i didn't want to be the one person flailing in a pose that others had okay or great.

It turned out that even though i didn't always think i had the energy, i always did. This was something that happened throughout the day and even in classes after. I just needed to turn the part of my brain off that said i couldn't do things and my body was fine with doing them.

Lunch Break

After that class, we got an hour long break. I ran home and tried to figure out what i was doing for the afternoon. I found some deli turkey in the fridge and ate some of that. It tasted pretty awesome and felt good, but i cut myself off.

I threw some of that into my little cooler i had for my frozen ice water. And i think i packed in some ice cubes as well. Even though they had water from a fridge available, i had been living off my own water supply through the morning. It seemed silly to waste that many bottles. I'd refill bottles and then drop them in the cooler with ice packs and then kept switching between classes.

Maybe it was the turkey slices, maybe it was just having a full hour break instead of 30 min, but the fifth class felt great. I was worried about the 2:30 and 4:30 classes because that teacher tends to keep them toasty. He was a bit more generous with the fans because of what was going on and because the room was a lot more crowded than usual.

The evening

At start of the sixth class, during the opening breathing exercises, i just started heating up. My whole chest was starting to feel like it was on fire. Not just the center, but my shoulders and neck, too.

I've pushed myself pretty hard in high heat and humidity. Both in this class and in the desert and in Texas. This was weird. It wasn't something i've felt before. I started to wonder if it was an indication i'd have to start sitting out postures.

But, soon enough it went away. And by the end of class, everything felt fine, so i just set my mat up for another class.

Also in the sixth class, a bunch of people who had been there all day disappeared. I had thought there were a lot of folks going, but apparently they had done what they were going to do.

It was sad to see them go. For the past few classes i had kept to the same area, and so had all these other people. So we were like a little pack. Didn't talk at all to the woman next to me, but we had been side by side for three classes, so it was weird not having her there.

After the sixth class, when the reigning champ left, it felt weird. I didn't want to beat his "record". I was happy to be breaking a new one along side him. The owner of the studio had started taking class in the second one and she was planning on doing five, so that was her last, too.

So the seventh felt a bit different. We now knew there were only three of us left who had done all of them. There was also the one guy who had done all but one.

And then there was the woman in front of me. She was in town to be in the Yoga Championship Nationals. So, while i was on my seventh class, in the mirror next to the image of me doing my pose was her doing her championship level poses.

Normally i'd be interested in seeing the differences, and even though i understood the training level difference, it still managed to be a touch de-moralizing.

After seven classes, the three of us going the distance seemed to all be fine. So we just hung out a bit and then went in for the eighth.

Last class

My plan for the eight class was to push myself as hard as possible in every posture. If i didn't make it through all of them because of that, it was fine. I didn't want to just fall over and collapse, which is something i had been slightly worried about all day, but i wanted to see how hard i could push myself with seven classes of warm up.

It turns out, i had enough energy in me to do that. And i think i could have done it again. I'm pretty sure i would have run out had there been one more class, but i could have gotten into it enough.

Given that the last class started at 8:30 PM on a Friday night, it was the first class in awhile that wasn't super crowded. And, in fact, it was pretty small. It added for a weird feel to things ending that way when there were so many people before.

But afterwards, we all congratulated each other, lingered a bit, then showered up and then went home. Nothing too celebratory, but it's not like we had energy for that, either.

Epilogue

I skipped class the next day. It was a bit hard motivating outside the house, but i went out to the beach and had a nice time with friends. I went back to class on Sunday. It wasn't bad at all. The whole next week i found i could push myself a lot harder than i thought i could given all that.

That night, the guy who did it said he would never see a reason to do that again. And i was having a hard time imagining how the guy who did seven before came back.

But this week he's been thinking the three of us should try side by side if they do it again.
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