It’s Monday night and I’m holding a plank in yoga class. A single bead of sweat rolls down my arm thanks to the temperature in the room which is heated to a welcoming 89°F. This winter, which has seemed interminably long and unusually cold here in Scotland, I’ve quietly fallen back in love with hot yoga. Once a week or so, usually the day after a long run, I come here to stretch it out and warm my bones.
Over the years, I’ve formed a love/hate relationship with hot yoga, having discovered it when I lived in New York where it was all the rage in the early noughties. When I moved to Colorado and learned that hot yoga there seemed to be synonymous with super fast-paced flows, I found it didn’t provide the recovery I needed when I spent so much time on the Rocky Mountain trails and my single visit to a Bikram Studio in San Francisco a decade ago was plenty for me to rule that out forever. But these days, so long as it’s not too hot or fast, I’m finding once again that it provides a nice balance to the time I spend in my hiking boots, trail running shoes and climbing shoes.
