Don’t throw up on the carpet. It’s new.

I finished a 30 day challenge at Hot Bikram Yoga's Balham studio yesterday. That's thirty consecutive days of one and a half hours of yoga sessions in a humid room heated to 40 degrees Celsius.

I started it because I had hurt my left elbow in the gym and I wanted to give it a rest from weights. In the first week, I put out my back out rushing Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee Pose. In the second week I got, what I took to be, gout in my left big toe triggered by dehydration and what may euphemistically be described as lifestyle choices (diet and booze). By this time, it was taking me twenty minutes to get out of bed before I could leave for the 6:30am class, and I couldn't hobble over a pedestrian crossing before the light turned red again.

I remember in this semi invalid period watching some other people in the full expression of Standing Separate Leg Stretching Pose. I had no idea we were attempting something that looked so extreme, or indeed that human beings could actually do it.

There is a strange sense in which, if you are committed to doing something every day, there is no rush, and for the last few weeks it has all been on the up. (Apart from one evening where I took a class, ate dinner at 9pm, found that Enter the Dragon was playing at 10pm on the TV, watched it over a wine box, and still took myself off to Balham at six thirty the next morning. That wasn't pretty.)

Then yesterday, as I was looking forward to finishing and chucking it in for a while, I finally got my head turned correctly in triangle pose found myself thinking, "I can probably get the hang of this if I do it forever."