Tonky Talk Yoga will bend Paul but it will not break him

It’s my habit with cars to drive them until they can’t go any longer, then call a garage, sell it for scrap and move on. I’m starting to feel like that about my own body. I’m injured again. As always, it came just at the moment I felt I was getting back to something like normal – ramping up the mileage, throwing in the odd surge on a long run and then came the familiar twinge of the calf, so sharp there was no option: I was walking home. I’ve taken stock. The cycle of running, injury, partial recovery, running, injury has to stop. The belief about my body’s ability to withstand any punishment without any strength work or stretching has been proved incontrovertibly wrong. There can be no rush back. This needs a full body reboot. So I’m planking, doing calf raises, stretching. The ultimate proof that I am taking this seriously is that I have started doing yoga. Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. I’ve done yoga once before, about 20 years ago, just one session. It felt brilliant; I wasn’t too good at it but I came out of the session tired yet revitalised – and never did it again.

Part of it was I didn’t see myself as that kind of person. I’ve just always been a tad distrustful of it all. The accoutrements of the yogi – the mat, the Lycra, the faux spirituality. Friends raved about how good it was for the mind and body. I’d sniff derisively, put my shorts on and run through the woods. My wife would come home glowing after her Saturday morning sessions.

‘You’d love it,’ she’d exclaim, and I’d make silly jokes involving the word ‘namaste’ and hobble to the shower. But now there’s no getting round it. I’m in.

So I find myself in front of the YouTube channel, doing a beginners’ class with Adrienne, whom everyone has been talking about. Adrienne is feline grace personified, a gentle guide artfully straddling the chasm between yogi expert and beginner with humour and understanding.

The first thing she does is sit down cross-legged on her mat and invite me to join her in the beginners’ pose. I try, I really do. It’s like dropping a bag of spanners on the floor. Everything hurts. My quads ache when I cross them. My lower back goes into a spasm.

Adrienne softly cajoles me into a pattern of deep inhales and long, smooth exhales. I’m hunched over, trying to get my shoulders back, so broken I can’t even sit. Then she’s rotating her neck. I can sort of do this, but it cracks and I fear I’m inducing a stroke. I breathe again. Adrienne suggests I look for my centre. She wants me to place my head over my heart and my heart over my pelvis. This is impossible but I am told not to worry, to find my own integrity and breathe into discomfort.

Over the next 20 minutes, we go through basic yoga moves. I am, seemingly, too inflexible to do simple things. At one point, I struggle to lock my hands together and keep them above my head. I breathe, I strain. At times, I stop and look at Adrienne, defeated, as she suggests I lengthen my neck and straighten my back.

Eventually, it’s over. We return to the prayer position, one last deep breath and then out.

The next day, I do it again, and it’s slightly easier. The following day, easier still. I’m tempted to rush this, but it’s slow. To work, it has to be slow. This is a new beginning. I can't believe it. I’m doing yoga – no joke.