My guilty pleasure is sitting. I’m slightly ashamed at how much I enjoy it: Sitting on couches, sitting in coffee shops, sitting, finally, after a long run. If I’m not working out or sleeping, I’m probably sitting.
This propensity for sitting might be why I feel like a beached whale, laying on my side doing leg raises while simultaneously trying to point the toes on my elevated leg toward the ceiling. I’m at a stretching-meets-physical-therapy class in an Inwood office building, in the hopes of undoing all the damage modern society — and my near-constant sitting — has inflicted on my mobility. The one other person in my class, a woman who appears to be in her fifties, is silently circling her left foot in the air while propped on her right side, hips stacked. She’s better at this than me, but not by much. Throughout the nearly two-hour class, we’ll slowly roll a tennis ball under our feet, lay on our backs, and pull one leg over the opposite side of our body, and use a strap to stretch out our hamstrings while splayed on our backs.
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