There was a time when I was obsessed with minutes. Getting my marathon time to 3:20 to qualify for Boston, or getting my half-marathon time down to 1:30 just because that seemed cool and hard to do. Now I am obsessed with inches, specifically, four of them, which is the current distance between my heel and the mat while I’m doing a downward-facing dog.

I’m a Runner: Cynthia Erivo.

These are the reasons, in no particular order, why I have resisted doing what everybody (friends, ex-wife, trainers, doctors, physical therapists, probably even a few strangers) advised me to do, and pick up yoga: It’s boring and easy, and boring because it’s easy. It’s for girls. It’s all about woo-woo and inner peace and spirituality, and I don’t go for that. And, I just don’t bend that way.

As any other man would tell you, the first three are just a smokescreen for the last. No self-respecting man would ever attempt something he knows he’ll fail at, because, in fact, we don’t actually respect ourselves enough to try. So I wasn’t going to go anywhere near a yoga studio until such time as I could touch my toes with legs straight, and that wasn’t happening in this lifetime.

When revelation came, it came in the form of a vision, much like Saul on the road to Damascus, but instead of Jesus it was Emily Blunt, in the science-fiction movie A Part of Hearst Digital Media. Ms. Blunt plays a futuristic warrior battling be-tentacled aliens with her bare hands, and when we meet her, she is lying prone on the ground except for the fact that she’s not actually on the ground but suspended above it, holding herself up on her bent arms, perfectly still and straight and parallel to the floor. It’s totally bad-ass, which is odd because it’s a yoga pose called the peacock, and peacocks are not generally considered to be symbols of bad-assery.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media, I thought.

Otherwise, it was mainly age. Runners are famous for having tight hips and hamstrings, and I’ve been running for decades now, and I am about as good at stretching as I am about returning phone calls. (Sorry, Mara! I swear, next time I have a spare moment.) With my 50th birthday receding in my rear-view mirror, I find myself making these odd noises whenever I have to step up onto something, or climb out of a car. The noises sound familiar to my ear. The noises are the same ones my father makes. My father turns 80 this year.

But the final step? A yoga studio opened down the block from me. And they offered me a week for free. And it was January in Chicago. I was willing to sign up just to sit in the hot studio.

Six months later, I’m addicted, going three days a week, on the days when I don’t run, or sometimes even when I do. The reasons I do it are very much linked to the reasons I didn’t do it, for so long…so, in order:

It’s boring and easy, and boring because it’s easy. First of all, it’s not easy, as my complete failure to do most of the poses shows. But another word for “boring” is “meditative,” and another word for that is “focused.” During class, after some struggle, I learned to focus on what I am doing, how I am doing it, how I am breathing, as per instruction. When I run, my mind wanders a hundred different places as my legs turn over and over in their automatic cadence, and while that kind of mental journey can be refreshing, it’s also good to be here, now, even if “here” is a very warm room where you’re trying to stand on one leg. Running Was His Life. Then Came Putin’s War.

It’s for girls. And so what? Girls are in fact pretty great, at any age, and if by “for girls” we mean “collaborative, cheerful, uplifting, positive, and bright,” then by God let me be more girlish. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that the male way of approaching problems—hitting them with one’s forehead until they go away or you die—is perhaps less than optimal, and the female way—getting together to encourage each other as you make small steps of progress—has its benefits. The teachers in my classes are almost all female, and it took me about, oh, 30 seconds to get over my ironic scoffing at their empty praise (“You’re looking good! So strong, Peter!”) and start wagging my imaginary puppy tail. And while yoga teachers rarely have the bulging muscles and rock-hard abs of other fitness instructors, they are lithe, supple, and strong as all get-out. There are worse things to be, such as my current stiff and saggy self.

It’s all about woo-woo and inner peace and spirituality, and I don’t go for that. Yeah, and maybe my not going for that may have something to do with the lack of hair on my head and the surplus of medications in my bathroom closet. Inner peace is only laughed at by people who don’t have it, and if I can trade my constant roiling inner monologue for 60 minutes of calm focus a few times a week, well, I still have plenty of time to dine on my own intestines the rest of the week. Every class in this studio ends with the teacher saying, “The light in me honors the light in you,” and the first few times it was everything I could do to repress a lame engine-warning-light joke. Now, I won’t say I believe in internal lights, but I’d like to.

I just don’t bend that way. True, and I still don’t…but I’m working on it. There was a time in my mid 30s I couldn’t run three miles without gasping, and I worked on it and trained and eventually ran marathons; and if I had just said to myself, “No way,” I’d still be overweight and heading for an early grave, and you wouldn’t be reading these words now. Why apply that kind of defeatism to my flexibility? It may be that psychologically, our ability to run is an issue of performance, and we are all trained to believe that performance can be improved. Yet flexibility seems like a property of our body, like our height or our features, and can’t be messed with. But it can. In fact, I have found the transformations from just six months of yoga, as minor as they are, to be as astounding as, if different from, those that came from running. I carry myself a little taller. My shoulders are more squared. My midsection seems tighter, and my poor knotted hamstrings a little longer. The feeling is not so much that I’m getting better, but that I’m becoming different—a metamorphosis rather than a gradual improvement. At my age, I didn’t know there was a butterfly in me.

But what about my running? This magazine has extolled yoga as an aid to running for years, and so far, I can vouch for it. My runs have felt looser, easier, and my recovery from them quicker. Pains that were starting to dog me in my hips and legs when I started the classes have faded away. But even better than all of that is a new kind of mental strength. I ran my first half marathon of the season in March, and I was not in great shape, and was feeling the strain way, way too early. So I remembered my (cheerful, upbeat, female) yoga instructor’s words, and concentrated on my breathing, deeply in, deeply out, with due attention paid to each step. I became calmer. The discomfort I was feeling faded. Instead of counting the miles, regretting the ones I had run (too fast!) and the ones to come (too far!), I practiced breathing, and being here, now—and thusly, I was there, then. And the miles passed.

As for the peacock pose—are you kidding me? But I’ve gotten decent at crow pose, where you support yourself on your bent arms, in a crouch, with your knees tucked on top of your elbows. All I have to do now is slowly extend the length of my body straight back, my torso and legs held up off the ground, all my weight in my arms, and, like Emily Blunt, exchange tough-guy dialogue with Tom Cruise without breathing hard. Seems impossible. But six months ago, so did crow.

I’m not sure if the light in me is strong enough yet to honor the light in you. But two or three times a week, I’ll be in a hot room on a mat, trying, with focused breaths, to fan my flame.

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