Social Yogging

Tonight is group ninja yog night.  Maybe people will show up, and maybe not.  I do hope some people show.  It was a month or two ago that I was looking forward to a Thursday night ninja yog, and after most people had already cancelled, I began to wonder if I should even yog if no one else was coming.  At that moment it hit me.  Whoa.  Who am I and how did I get here? 

For a stretch of about 7 years starting in college, yogging was an on again, off again, holy-shit-my-pants-don't-fit-I-gotta-do-something-about-that activity that would stay for a few months then go for who knows how long.  But finally, about 6 years ago, mostly because San Diego weather is so accomodating, it latched on as a continuous, sustainable hobby.   For the first couple years, almost all of my yogging was solo, and through all that solo yogging I began to understand and embrace what a genuine introvert I am.  People aware of my yogging would often ask how I dealt with the boredom, if I had headphones or such.  Boredom?  Monotony?  What?  Moving along the coast alone with my thoughts was the most stimulating part of my day.  Internal discussions about politics, social philosophy, poker strategy, my disorted personal values and failed relationships and any number of other things would flood my mind, never leaving a second to agonize over the repetitive nature of the activity.  Track workouts were the only occasion for social yogging, and I enjoyed that.  But, when people would invite me on a group yog, I'd pretend that was a good idea, because I didn't want to seem like some kind of anti-social freak, but would intentionally never follow up on it and hope they wouldn't either.  Forced social interaction during an activity that I cherished for myself?  Fuck that!

So how did I get to the point where I'll consider not yogging unless I have company?  I dunno.  These fuckers I yog with crept up on me.  At some point, when yogging 6 days a week, I didn't mind adding 1 additional group yog per week.  As my overt resistance to social yogging was wearing off, along came the ninja yog.  It started by inviting the quickly improving Dr E along for Thursday evening runs, thinking he could benefit by being pushed just a little bit beyond his comfort zone.  That went well.  CBB started joining sometimes on her always trashed bike legs and that was awesome.  But really the additions of the Suffer Seeker and Shoulder Toucher as regulars took it to a new level.  The Suffer Seeker brought his physical invincibility, his incredibly pure passion for the yog, the ability to breathe 200x a minute while yogging in total comfort, and the tendency to drop the hammer and establish dominance just at the moment you most wanted to take it easy.  The Shoulder Toucher brought his utterly inimitable personality, the penchant to drop off near the end and limp it in with an excuse always ready in hand, a passion for surveying the female talent, and of course, touching shoulders.  Both of them invariably refused to look at the route for the run that I'd e-mail out the morning before, and as the days turned to night earlier, this would often lead to us bumping into and stumbling over eachother when it came time to make a turn or road crossing.  The yogs were challenging, unpredictable, and just kind of goofy.  It was a great dynamic. 

From there on, group yogs became more and more of the norm, not because I expected that dynamic with every person or every group I yogged with, but because I associated that positive experience with social yogging as opposed to seeing it as an unwanted intrusion on my precious internal monologues.  The outlets for my introverted needs got slowly pushed into other arenas.  I remember thinking, after a weekend full of idiocy in the canyons and bars in 2010 with the Suffer Seeker and the American Hero, at a time where I thought my yogging improvements had flatlined forever, that that experience is exactly why I wanted to continue my yogging.  Challenging.  Unpredictable.  Goofy.  If something like that was happening, I needed to be in shape enough to show up.  It didn't occur to me at the time what a departure that was from the basis of my yogging hobby a few years earlier. 

It was really an unremarkable transition, but fun to retrace the steps.