lighthouse point, santa cruz, ess and i are hanging out above the dog beach. steamer lane, where i shoot most of my surf action shots, is on the other side of the point. the waves rarely break on this side and when they do, it’s right off that rock, which makes it a good spot for only really good surfers.

i could not sleep last night—woke up at 4 in the morning, excited about the yoga asana championships today. i’m about 10 years away from competing, so i was mostly excited because my teachers were going to be there. i was gonna do the 8 am bikram, but since i was awake, i went to the 6 instead. bundled up in my yellow rain suit, i biked in the dark to my early morning bikram yoga class.

class was incredible. you know the early morning class is never warm enough, so i wore a thermal to compensate for it. no water since i wanted my body to stay warm. since returning from my back injury, i’m really trying to step up my practise. it’s really a test of my patience to not go for it some poses, but i think this is going to help improve my practise too. like in standing bow, shoulder to chin has been my weak spot. since i’m not going very far in that pose, i’m able to really work on that shoulder stretch. when my back is ready, my shoulder will be ready too.

part of me is kind of bummed about the yoga cup happening this weekend. last year it was my goal to attend this year’s event, rent a room in the hotel and have an underground boutique store of sweat tank tops and hoodies. well, just because it was only a pipe dream, doesn’t mean it won’t happen someday. the event today was awesome, inspiring. wow. there were a lot of beautiful backbends. a lot of beautiful women. chiseled men. many beautiful poses. seems to me like standing head to knee and standing bow give competitors the most problems. they wobble or flail out of the beginning poses, but nail the advanced poses. i wonder if it’s because they learned the advanced poses at a different time in their yoga practise. i think it’d be fun to compete, but my body is about 10 years away from that level. maybe they’ll have a seniors division then!

here are the final results from friday’s 2010 yoga asana u.s. nationals:
women 1. brandy winfield 2. anne marie paul 3. afton carraway
men 1. joseph encinia 2. bel carpenter 3. zeb homison

congrats to everyone who participated, y’all are so inspiring! namaste ~m

Tags: art, bikram yoga, leica, nature, santa cruz photographs

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 9:38 pm and is filed under daily thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.