Yoga is no day at the beach

SIESTA KEY, FLA.— Midway through an otherwise restful vacation trip, my wife suggests that we should take advantage of our hotel’s free yoga class on the beach.

“Maybe it will help you become more limber and have better balance,” she says. Apparently a husband who is witty and ruggedly handsome is not enough for some women.

But I work out at the gym three days a week, so how hard could it be to sit on a mat saying “Ooohhm,” or whatever it is that yogis do?

So we walk to the beach and join a couple dozen women of substantial age who are arranging rubber mats in the sand. When the mats are arranged, we sit cross-legged on them and the instructor has us take deep breaths. Inhale ... exhale. Inhale ... exhale. Soothing music drifts from the CD player. Waves from the Gulf of Mexico roll gently to the beach. Seagulls float above us. It’s all very pleasant.

Then the instructor says to stand up, bend over and touch our toes. I stand up, bend over, reach down and extend my arms as far as they will go, which is to the general vicinity of my kneecaps.

As the cracking sounds in my back threaten to drown out the soothing music, the instructor tells us to kneel, bend forward with our elbows on the mats, extend our right legs straight behind us, hold them there and then alternate. Right leg, hold... left leg, hold ... right leg, hold ... left leg, hold. I kneel, put my elbows on the mat, extend my right leg behind me and immediately topple over sideways.

While everyone else extends their left legs, I’m still stuck on my back like a Galapagos tortoise. By the time I get up, everyone else is at least three legs ahead of me, so I decide to give up and wait for the next exercise. After 45 minutes of watching me try to contort my body in ways that men’s bodies were never meant to be contorted, my wife has to concede that limberness is not one of my attributes and that I’ll probably be unbalanced for the rest of my life.

I guess she’ll just have to settle for witty and ruggedly handsome.