Sage Rountree - The Runner’s Guide to Yoga: A Practical Approach to Building Strength and Flexibility for Better Running

Sages clear approach to incorporating yoga into a training season perfectly addresses all the things athletes need to hear about flexibility and balanced conditioningand Sage delivers it in a way that athletes can relate to.

Karen Dubs, creator of the Flexible Warrior Athletic Yoga DVD series

Yoga is not only good for athletesit is essential, for both the physical and mental benefits.... Sage shares the benefits that yoga has brought to her life as an athlete and offers easy-to-follow yoga postures and breathing techniques to help athletes of all sports get started with a safe and effective yoga routine and to help them avoid or rehabilitate an injury.

Beryl Bender Birch, author of Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga, Director/Founder of The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute, and contributor to Yoga Journal

Endurance athletes generally have poor flexibility, core strength, balance, and posture. Improving these can really change performance for the better. The Athletes Guide to Yoga is a great resource to get you on the path to better training and racing.

Joe Friel, founder of Ultrafit and author of The Triathletes Training Bible, The Cyclists Training Bible, and The Mountain Bikers Training Bible

The Athletes Guide to Yoga is a practical in-your-body guidebook for anyone wanting to take their fitness routine into new realms. Clearly written, beautifully illustrated, its a real resource for starting and deepening a practice that stays true to yogas depth. Postures, breathing, relaxation, meditation, training routines, its all here.

Richard Faulds, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health

Somehow Sage Rountree has managed to maintain her yogic voice ... while also toning it down just enough to speak directly to an athlete.... The book is straightforward without all the frou-frou and implied incense-burning and ohmmm of yoga that could turn off some athletes.... Since she herself is a triathlete and runner, Rountree knows exactly where you get tight and why, what it feels like before and after certain workouts, the difficulties of combining a good yoga practice with hard training, and whats realistic or not for an athlete.

SNEWS

Whether youre a yogini or youve never heard of downward-facing dog, youll come away with something useful from The Athletes Guide to Yoga.

Womens Adventure magazine

This comprehensive book on yoga for athletes makes a compelling case for why and, more importantly, how athletes of every stripe can benefit from making yoga a regular part of their workout regimens.

American Council on Exercise Get Fit

This sweet little book is a delightful and abundant source of yoga pose sequences. The Athletes Pocket Guide to Yoga is a great resource for yoga teachers and an easy source of inspiration and guidance for beginner to intermediate yogis.

YogaBasics.com

For time-crunched yogis and jocks who dont even identify with the term yogi but want a good stretch or cross-training workout, take a look at The Athletes Pocket Guide to Yoga. With no need to attend a class or even watch a DVD, theres no excuse to not get a few poses in.

GearJunkie.com

Copyright 2012 by Sage Rountree

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by VeloPress, a division of Competitor Group, Inc.

3002 Sterling Circle, Suite 100

Boulder, Colorado 80301-2338 USA

(303) 440-0601 Fax (303) 444-6788 E-mail

Distributed in the United States and Canada by Ingram Publisher Services

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Print)

Rountree, Sage Hamilton.

The runners guide to yoga: a practical approach to building strength and flexibility for better running / Sage Rountree.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-934030-84-4 (Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-937716-32-5 (ePub)

1. Hatha yoga. 2. RunningTraining. I. Title.

RC1220.Y64R687 2012

613.7046dc23

2012000698

For information on purchasing VeloPress books,

please call (800) 811-4210 ext. 2138 or visit www.velopress.com.

Cover and interior design by Vicki Hopewell

Cover and interior photographs by Cindy Hamilton

Composition by Jane Raese

Text set in Bembo.

v. 3.0

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.

T. S. Eliot

Running and yoga go together like yang and yin. While at first they may seem disparate, they are instead complementary. And just as the Taoist yin-yang symbol displays a circle of the yang in the yin and a circle of the yin in the yang, running and yoga each hold space for the other at their core.

While running involves moving forward through space, covering miles of ground at a time, a yoga practice is usually confined to a 2.5-by-6-foot mat. But both involve using the mind, body, and breath in unison to testand often to surpassthe boundaries of what we think we can do. While running involves doing, pushing, working, a yoga asana practice is often about being, yielding, resting. But both require and develop the athletes intuition about when and how much to strive, when and how much to surrender. While running can emphasize numbers such as mathematical progressions of mileage and interval pace and team or series points, yoga eschews much scientific categorization. But both teach us to follow the voice within. And while running can seem to be about competition, yoga can seem to shun competition. But we learn from both that we create competition from our own minds and that it can push us to perform and grow in wonderful ways.

In my classes and in this book, I teach about intention, form, and breath. We need to be clear on our intentionour reason for doing the workout, our goal for the race, our resolve for the yoga practice. Once intention is clear, it helps us use the most efficient form for the task at hand and the right breath to support that form. When we run, proper form creates endurance by using only the energy we need. When we practice yoga poses, we need to engage the right muscles to support the shape and then relax everywhere else. In both, we need to use the breath that supports the demands on the body.

My intention for this book is to share tools that will help you find the right balance between running and yoga, between doing and being, and between moving through the world and investigating inner experience. This book is not a comprehensive treatise on the yoga system or even yoga poses, but instead covers the elements of yoga that work best for runners. And I want to use the breathhere, the voicethat supports the form, speaking in language grounded in the body but open to the more spiritual aspects of both running and yoga.

Thank you for reading.

Yoga is a teacher-based system. While our experience of transformation happens through a diligent personal practice, the tradition is handed down from one teacher to another, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my own teachers. In particular, Michael Johnson and Leslie Kaminoff have expanded my understanding of the Yoga Sutras