Feel the Burn

One of the things I love about yoga is that it's pretty easy to do anywhere. A non-slip surface, enough space, you're ready to go. You can get some decent exercise in without leaving your hotel room.

Unless your hotel room is laid out so that there isn't 7 straight feet of space anywhere at all.

On the 27th floor, there's a pool and fitness room, quite a nice one actually. If you're on the treadmills or bikes, you're looking out over the city, the lake, the CN Tower within spitting distance past the glass, or so it seems.

There's one spot for stretching, which I just took over for yoga. I felt weird and show offy at first. It is impossible to to do yoga in a gym setting without being noticed. Particularly if you thought you'd be doing yoga in your room, so you only brought your wee shorts and deeply-v cut shirt that shows every single one of the tattoos on your torso.

I almost let that stop me, because while I certainly have an exhibitionist streak in me, I tend to keep it for select - queer - audiences.

In case you were wondering, the gym on the 27th floor of the Delta Chelsea is not queer space.

But I really wanted to breathe deeply, do sun salutations to scrape away the conference haze, twist the stiffness out of my mid back and shoulder.

It was a surprising pleasure to do yoga in a non-yoga spot. I wasn't comparing myself to the yoga stars with whom I usually do yoga, which surprisingly, allowed me to try going deeper into poses than I might otherwise.

There was a lot of outside noise: tvs, machine beeping, conversations poolside. It smoothed out into waves of white noise as I pulled myself into myself, the sharp chlorinated air into my lungs.