Quarantine Yoga

YogaFit offered virtual yoga classes during the stay-at-home order.

Our health clubs and yoga centers have been closed since mid-March. Marissa and I were in a good groove of working out at the club two or three times every week. I often made an extra trip during the week while she was at school. And then...nothing.

Our local YogaFit studio did an amazing job of creating virtual yoga classes. Their instructors would be in the empty studio with a laptop and a microphone. Every day they emailed the next day's schedule with links to the video and the Spotify playlist if you wanted the music the instructor picked in the background. They asked everyone to pay for classes they took online, even though it was really on the honor system as to whether or not you attended. They were really amazing and gracious at making yoga accessible during this time.

I took a few classes during this quarantine time, and realized how much I had missed yoga in my life. The long stretches, the muscles that you didn't know you had being sore the day after the session, it was awesome.

One day I picked up another class in the morning while both the girls were still in bed. (This could have been a 10 a.m. class, just to get a sense of how late my teens are sleeping in this summer.) I was in the basement where the only carpet in the house is located so that I had a nice cushy surface under my yoga mat.

In the middle of my class I hear Marissa get up. She comes down to the basement with a load of laundry, waves at me and goes to the laundry room to start her wash. Shortly after, I hear Lindsey get up.

How can I tell the difference, you ask? I have two words for you: Elephant. Feet.

Lindsey can be heard from two floors away when she gallops down stairs. Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom!! I think she hits every other step and takes all of the momentum and puts it all into the heel of her foot. Boom boom boom boom down two flights of stairs.

She peeks at me in the family room, then goes into the laundry room to get her laundry out of the dryer. I can hear Marissa still putting her laundry in the washing machine, and then, suddenly...a scream.

I'm not exactly sure how Marissa did NOT hear Lindsey's elephant feet coming down the two flights of stairs, but considering how well she tunes out the outside world much of the time, it was not surprising..but still surprising.

I hear the two of them laugh at how Marissa got scared. And then they start bickering.

"How could you not hear me coming down the stairs?"

"You KNOW how easily I get scared, why didn't you say something?!"

"Well I did, but you didn't hear me say that either!"

"You KNOW I have my headphones on, you could've done something else."

"Like what, turn the lights on and off? Like that wouldn't have freaked you out..."

And back and forth and back and forth. In the meantime, my yoga instructor is telling me to inhale slowly while doing some tricky balance move. Finally I yell out:

"Can you guys NOT? I'm doing FUCKING YOGA!"

Which was answered by a couple of giggles and then the two girls went back up the stairs together, laughing about how they annoyed their mother.

I was left wondering if they did that just to annoy me. I somehow managed to re-focus on my class and finish it out. We all laughed about it afterwards.

And that's quarantine yoga for you.