Eppie’s Champ Likes Things Hot

Hot Yoga keys performance for RC studio owner

By BILL HICKS, Jr., Sports Editor - It’s a story that has been at the forefront of recent sports coverage: an aging champion athlete whose performance has spiked late in life.
Signs point in only one direction - hot yoga.
Okay, so a brow of dripping sweat isn’t quite what some had in mind with this story about a juiced athlete, but Eppie’s Champion Bobby Carpenter has only one explanation for why his performance has improved past the age of 50 and he says it’s hot yoga.
Carpenter has been a serious competitive runner for several years and, like many runners in their 40s and beyond, Carpenter saw his times plateau.
“I just figured that’s the way it was,” Carpenter said. “I had progressed, reached a certain age and it was as good as I was going to get.”
But Carpenter had not yet seen the types of times he had hoped for or even dreamed of until about six or seven years ago when he took up hot yoga.
“I had tried yoga before and I hadn’t really gotten too much out of it as far as my performance,” Carpenter said. But his first day inside a steamy hot yoga studio, the difference was obvious and immediate.
“I noticed results right away,” Carpenter said who, along with his wife, Robin, will preach his yoga gospel to anyone within earshot.
Like the exercise form that so many associate with incense, crystals and sitar music, hot yoga is a practice of poses and forms that propagate flexibility, strength and balance.
The main difference, as the name implies, is the hot part.
The studio at Carpenter’s Sunrise facility is kept somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 degrees, with humidity ranging between 30 to 50 percent.
“The heat really allows you to get deeper into the poses,” Carpenter said. “You can get a lot more flexible.”
The result is something of a natural steroid effect, according to the Carpenters.
Robin, who is part of a highly successful Eppie’s team in her own right, runs very infrequently, but says the yoga helps diminish the ill effects of running.
“I might run once a week or maybe every other week and I can get in three miles with no problems at all, my stamina is in tact, and I never wake up sore the next day,” she said.
For Bobby, the effect is magnified by his more intense training schedule.
“I have a lot fewer injuries, I can train a lot harder and the result is I can go faster and faster,” said Carpenter. And faster might be a mild understatement.
Carpenter has shaved more than two full minutes off of his average time for 5K runs - which is the rough distance of a cross-country meet. He has chopped, three quarters of an hour off of his marathon times.
Carpenter’s first marathon times were in the neighborhood of 3 hours 40 minutes, which was about middle of the road for runners 10 years Bobby’s junior at the time.
Now, Carpenter is running marathons right around 2:58, which can challenge for the championship in his division in the California Marathon and is only a few minutes shy of a winning division time in the Boston Marathon.
“My times are still getting faster,” Carpenter said. “It’s really been phenomenal. Now I’m starting to wonder what age I can go to.” Carpenter has also noted improvements in swimming and tennis, as well.
But the Carpenters are quick to warn people about excusing hot yoga too quickly.
“It’s like any other thing in sports,” Robin said. “You’ve got to start somewhere and then you just put your time in and you’ll get better. We like to tell people that yoga isn’t about how fit and flexible you are, it’s about how fit and flexible you’ll become.”
Men, especially, have been traditionally dismissive of yoga, but Bobby insists men will see a difference with hot yoga.
“None of us (men) are all that flexible,” Carpenter said. “You’ll sweat like you’ve never sweated before, but you’ll get over your injuries so much quicker and those little nagging things just disappear...it’s amazing.”
Whether or not hot yoga is the natural steroid is seems to be can be determined by individual students, but Carpenter is planning on getting faster and faster. And hot yoga is a big part of that plan for the future.
“There’s such a noticeable improvement in my running,” Carpenter said. “But I’m going to be doing yoga long after I’m done running.”

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