Yoga for athletes Virginia

Ann is a 200 hour RYT with Yoga Alliance, certified at the wonderful Yoga H’Om in Pittsburgh, PA. She is also a serious runner, who specialized in the 5k/10k while running for the University of Notre Dame. Ann earned her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Virginiain 2014. While in her graduate program, she taught more than 570 yoga classes while continuing to run and race. She believes her training and background in English literature helps her communicate more effectively as a yoga teacher. Ann is very happy to be able to pursue both a career in academia and her goal of bringing more yoga to the running community!

Ann grew up competing in the endurance sports of running and swimming. During her sophomore year in high school, Ann decided she was tired of being known as the “not flexible one” amongst the girls in her family—both her mom and sister were competitive gymnasts—and started stretching daily. This early stretching-related body awareness paid off later when Ann ran track and cross country for Notre Dame. While running for ND’s competitive Division I program, Ann soon learned that stretching not only helped her stay uninjured and feel much smoother while running, but that it also made her a faster runner. As a walk-on to Notre Dame, Ann went on to earn All Big-East and NCAA All-Region honors in cross country. She typically stretched for at least an hour a day while running collegiately, and enjoyed figuring out stretches that most helped runner-specific tightness. During her senior year, her college coach put her in charge of leading the women’s team stretching for every practice, leading to significantly fewer injuries team-wide. However, Ann has always loved helping her teammates and other runners learn stretches that most targeted and alleviated their particular tightness. As she knows from experience, an uninjured runner is a happy runner!

Ann began practicing yoga in 2005, and became a certified yoga teacher in 2009 with the goal of helping runners and athletes continue in the sports they love and to become injured less often! Since Fall 2009, she has accumulated over 800 hours of yoga teaching experience, through instructing University of Virginia students, faculty, and staff, and various running groups and camps.

In her spare time, Ann enjoys revising her book manuscript The Nineteenth-Century Home Theatre: Women and Material Space. She also acts with the Victorian Theatrical Society, a graduate student-run group which she founded in 2009 and produces authentic Victorian parlour plays for academic conferences and the university community. Ann was the 2014-2015 Shannon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. She is currently a Lecturer of English at UVa where she enjoys teaching courses on Victorian literature and academic writing.