Hot Mat Pilates and The Shroud of Turin
As I am getting up there in years it has become harder and harder to get enough exercise, well at least it has become easier and easier to talk myself out of it. Taking long walks in the mornings are a real non-starter, especially when it is cold and dark outside. After work has always been the go-to time to get some form of exercise, but lately it has been very easy to find a reason not to.
Some colleagues here at the office started talking about Hot Mat Pilates. This is a place you can go to do “pilates” (more on this later) and, get this - I’m serious, you do this in a room that is heated to 102°F 40% humidity. And you exercise in this room ON PURPOSE for 45 minutes. It gets weirder: class starts at 6:00 am. Yes, that is Ohhh six hundred reveille. Back in December I tried a class and it was kind of OK because it felt really good when the 45 minutes were up. Since then I have been a dozen or more times and I am getting the hang of it. A big plus is that there is no guilt when I get home from work because I have already done my exercise for the day.
“Pilates” for those gentle readers not in the know is, to quote Google “... a form of exercise that emphasizes core strength, flexibility, and body awareness….”. In man-speak it is the exercise equivalent of a “chick flick”. About half of the time, I am the only guy in class, and when there is other male participation, it's only one or two others. About half of the clientele are your basic skinny twenty-something waifs either looking at their phones or themselves in the front mirror. This is not a dig at them - they are concentrating on their form. Personally, I wince upon catching a glimpse of my bulky reflection. About half of the remaining half are perhaps not twenty something and maybe a tad less “waif-like” but still very fit and have lots of tattoos. The last 25% are, like me, empty nester denizens, some of which are still very fit and some with a little junk in the trunk or, like in my specific case, excess meat in the midriff.
I like a specific spot along the back wall because there is a building column there that provides a skosh of extra space. I have 30 more years and 100 more lbs on most everyone else in the room. Age and size has me prone to the occasional escaping puft of flatulence and the frequent mumbling of expletives (some a bit louder than decorum would allow). Depending on the exercise, I will be overcome with “exercise induced turrets syndrome” and begin emitting a toxic cloud of profanity laced spittle that would make Samuel L. Jackson blush. A move called “mermaids” is a particularly rough “gonad grinder” for us males of the species and can often trigger these profanity attacks. The skosh of extra space is as much a benefit to my neighbors as it is to me.
The instructors are extremely fit, peppy, and very encouraging. They say things like:
• “Breathe in through your nose and exhale like you are blowing on a cup of hot coffee”
• “OK, you have already done the hardest part - you got out of bed and showed up”
• “You guys look so good, 6 am rocks it”
• “Now we are going to light up that core! Table top crunches in 3, 2, 1”
• “OK now 1 inch pulses, breathe. You guys are so great!”
• “Happy baby high plank shoulder taps rock climb combo with pilates 100 in 3, 2, 1”
• “30 more seconds of opportunity on these donkey kicks, right here right now”
• “Leave it all on the mat, the back row is killing it”
I was thinking that if this was primarily a male class with a male instructor, you would not hear this self-affirming encouragement. It would probably hear things like:
• “You maggots stink”
• “My grandmother can do better than you turd birds”
• “That’s not how WE do inverted table top leg lifts”
• “Because the entire back row completely bites, the WHOLE class has to stay and do ten extra minutes of high planks”
Did I mention the room is kept at a balmy 102°F? Under normal room temperature conditions I begin to sweat just looking at even thinking about a sweater. I am already close to drenched sitting still on my mat before class even starts. Most everyone has a “mat towel” which is a thin terry cloth article the same size as your mat that allegedly keeps your mat drier. Fat chance in my case. “You cannot NOT have a mat towel!” is what I can sense these ladies are thinking when giving my spot the once over.
I have a particularly dense sweat outline on my mat. I believe this is because when I cook (which is very often) if a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of olive oil or butter, I put in two. With garlic, I use a 3 or 4 multiplier on the number of cloves called for. This has to be a recipe for extra smarmy and permeable sweat. Over time I noticed that the dark sweat outline on my mat looked familiar. Then it dawned on me upon a flashback of History Channel documentary TV: It resembles the outline on the Shroud of Turin.
I launched a scientific investigation. Countless hours of painstaking research resulted in the following findings:
The similarities between the outlines is uncanny. In thinking about this further, perhaps the Shroud of Turin was simply Jesus Christ’s yoga mat towel from his workout sessions at his local Pontius Pilate’s Pilates workout emporium.
Further research into this fascinating sphere also turned up other outline similarities. One in particular is:
Perhaps there is no connection to the Shroud of Turin at all and my hot mat pilates outline simply illustrates the obvious: I am simply a large sweaty galloot.
I’m OK for now keeping up Hot Mat Pilates simply because the best part is at the end when someone brings you a refrigerated lavender scented cold towel for your head. That in itself is worth the price of admission.
Another good thing is that on days when I don’t go to class and I open my eyes and see 5:00 am on the clock, I immediately think “I have at least 3600 seconds of opportunity for more sleep - right here right now.”
Yours in lavender-scented recovery,