Yoga Rescue

00:04
Brent Hinson
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Hello, and welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. We are a podcast going beyond the bads to allow members of law enforcement public safety and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. Hi doing. I’m your co host, Brent. Hinson. And listen, I know what’s going to happen when you hear what today’s episode is about. As soon as I say the word yoga, a lot of you are going to say, no, they’re just going to tune out. That’s not for me. How does this relate to law enforcement? And to be totally transparent, I’ve never tried yoga myself. But listen to me. I have talked with officers who have done yoga. I have heard testimonials from officers who have said it has changed their lives for the better, both mentally and physically.

00:58
Brent Hinson
So today’s guest is going to recount his story and explain how incorporating yoga has turned his life around. It’s going to be very interesting. But before we bring him in, allow me to introduce our host, the top downward dog of this operation. He is Mr. Michael Warren. How are you, sir?

01:17
Michael Warren
I will be very upfront and honest with you, my friend. I’m a bit tired. And were talking before were recording that over the past ten days, I’ve been home one and I’ve been on ten separate flights, and so I’m dragging a little bit.

01:32
Brent Hinson
My friend, you are a man who’s constantly on the go. You’re in demand is what you are.

01:37
Michael Warren
Yeah, well, as luck would have it, as a result of it, you and I get to hang out for a little bit in person next week. We’ll be doing some work, actually, on the day that this episode will be released in Shelby County, Tennessee. So I’m looking forward to seeing you and hanging out with the folks there.

01:55
Brent Hinson
It’s so weird. We’ve done so many of these episodes and you and I and Aaron, we’ve only been in the same room, I think, like two. It just we’re always on these virtual recordings, so it’s weird when we’re actually in the same room together.

02:08
Michael Warren
Weird is a good word for when we’re all together. But no more weird, I guess, really, than our time that we spent before we start recording these podcasts.

02:18
Vance Row
Exactly.

02:19
Brent Hinson
So I got to ask you up front, have you ever tried yoga? Because I said I’ve never tried it. I think the reason why is I’m a little trepidation because I don’t know where to start or what to do or how I’m going to feel. So have you tried this before?

02:35
Michael Warren
I have not. And to be very upfront and I’ll share my story with the listeners when we get there, but it’s one of those things that I’ve wanted to do. But I think the thing that scares me most about it is it seems like they have their own language, and when they start talking, when you see videos, it’s like, I don’t know what they’re talking about.

02:59
Brent Hinson
What’s like runners. You speak a language once you get into that space, and you can kind of relate. So you just have to immerse yourself in that culture.

03:08
Michael Warren
Hopefully today our guests can kind of guide us along that little path so we at least have an understanding of what it is we’re hearing. So why don’t you go ahead and introduce him and bring him out? Let’s see if he can’t help you and I out some.

03:20
Brent Hinson
All right. I’m looking forward to hearing his perspective. Our guest today was a police officer for more than 20 years and worked for both Ocean City, Maryland police and Salisbury, Maryland police during his law enforcement career. After a number of back injuries in 2008 and 2009, he started to incorporate yoga into his physical therapy routine. And after seeing the multiple benefits yoga provided for himself, he decided to channel that energy into teaching yoga to other first responders and public safety professionals. Today he’s a certified instructor specializing in working with those in the military and first responder communities. Please welcome to the podcast the man who I hear was named 2022 Yoga Warrior, mr. Vance Rowe. Welcome to the podcast, sir.

04:08
Vance Row
Well, thank you, guys. Thank you so much. What a warm introduction that was. I love it.

04:12
Brent Hinson
We try.

04:12
Michael Warren
It’s amazing what the Internet yields isn’t, right?

04:15
Vance Row
Right?

04:16
Michael Warren
For our listeners. You and I, we met a few years ago at a trainer’s conference in Ocean City.

04:23
Vance Row
That’s right.

04:24
Michael Warren
So I want to start with you, if I could, kind of the way we start with everybody. What was it at what point what was the deciding factor that made you decide that a career in law enforcement.

04:37
Vance Row
Was for know, there’s two things that really stand out in my I’d say they’re like middle school and high school age. And the first one is when I was in Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts. It was one of those levels. I can’t remember which one. We visited the Baltimore County Police Station in Woodlawn, and I got to see kind of the behind the scenes, and I was like, oh, this is super cool. Now, I don’t think at that moment I was like, oh, I’m going to be doing this as a career. Fast forward. I want to say I was in high school, and the movie The Fugitive came out, and I was determined to be Tommy Lee Jones. I am like, I am going to join the Marshals office, and I’m going to hunt people down through this country. He was super cool, right?

05:22
Brent Hinson
He was pretty BA.

05:24
Vance Row
Now, what I will tell you is when I started in college, I actually started working for the summers in Ocean City, and that started right after my freshman year in Got. It kind of got in my blood. I had already been to Ocean City hundreds of times before, but the idea of working locally and working for your municipality, I liked that idea more than federal. So I changed my major from political science to criminal justice, and I ended up going through the criminal justice degree. I actually did my internship with the Ocean City Police through my college, and then it just kind of worked out. I did go to Salisbury City for a very brief amount of time. That’s who hired me initially. That’s who I went through the police academy with. I worked for a year there before I lateraled over to Ocean City, which really had been the goal all along, to go back to where I had.

06:17
Michael Warren
Well, let’s go back to the movie for a second, because after that movie came out, it actually was a very big tool, perhaps unintentionally, for recruitment for the US. Marshals. But a lot of people took the movie and thought that’s what all of their time with the marshals were going to be like. And what most people don’t realize is that half the year you’re typically doing fugitive apprehension type work, but the other half the year you’re serving as basically a federal bailiff in federal courts. And that’s not what is reflected in that movie.

06:59
Vance Row
That’s not when I’m standing right over, standing at the waterfall about to catch my fugitive.

07:04
Michael Warren
I don’t care.

07:08
Vance Row
I only want the super cool part.

07:10
Michael Warren
I had a friend that went on a task force with the Marshals, and this is how he described it. He says, Mike, it’s like our time when were signed to DEA, except you don’t have nearly the paperwork because you’re not making cases, you’re snatching bodies. The cases have already been made. And I thought that was a great way of describing at least the six months that you’re doing fugitive stuff. Probably not the other six months of the year.

07:36
Vance Row
Right. You just got to grab them up.

07:38
Michael Warren
Absolutely.

07:38
Vance Row
I love it.

07:39
Michael Warren
What was it you said you were working for Ocean City some during the summers I was. Of your college. And so why don’t you give our listeners an idea of what Ocean City is like? Because in many ways, it’s sure.

07:55
Vance Row
So for decades now, ocean City has hired summer police officers and summer cadets to police this busy summer resort town. So we are a tiny little town on the East Coast, and we sit literally just below the state of Delaware, but we can become Maryland’s second largest state in the summertime because of tourism, because people are coming down here and spending their summertime with us, maybe on the weekend, maybe over Memorial Day, maybe over 4 July. So while we have, I don’t know, 20,000 people in town, on any given wintertime weekend, we might have somewhere between three and 500,000 on any summer activity. So we need help with our police force so at 19 and 20, I was a cadet. And what that meant is that I was a meter maid, essentially, and I wrote parking tickets, and then I helped direct traffic. And then when I became 21, I went through our seasonal police academy, and then I was a seasonal police officer for three summers, and my last summer was my internship summer.

09:04
Michael Warren
So for folks who don’t understand, like me, your seasonal police officers, did they tend to be college students, or was there another part of the population that tended to be those types of seasonal folks?

09:19
Vance Row
I mean, we will get some people that are not college students. Maybe that people that just came out of the military, and they’re looking to get law enforcement jobs. This lets them get an incredible amount of experience in a short amount of time. A large majority are criminal justice students because that’s how we recruit, we go to colleges. And later on in my career, that actually became my job was actually being, like, the recruiting coordinator and the guy that was going out and talking about it. So we get a lot of people that come out of criminal justice classrooms, and that’s not necessarily just nearby. We get them from the state of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and then we get them from like ten and 12 hours away, up in the Northeast maybe, and sometimes in the Midwest, because you just can’t do this other places.

10:09
Michael Warren
I’m going to put you on the spot here, okay? Because would it be safe to say that perhaps the Ocean City summer program was the police version of The Fugitive movie? Because you just described what Ocean City is like during the summer where you have hundreds of thousands of people and there’s all kinds of stuff going on. I can only imagine when you have that many tourists that there’s a lot of them that misbehave and that the traffic is just incredibly bad. That’s what they come into the Ocean City with, and then they get hired as a full time person, and February comes, and February isn’t anything at all. No, like July was. Did some of them struggle with that transition from being that busy to that not busy?

11:04
Vance Row
So it’s funny, in the time where I was getting hired, ocean City was hiring, like, one cop a year on a full time basis. And the chief of police at the time, he kind of had a rule that you had to survive an Ocean City winner to see if you would really stick around. And, I mean, I got to tell you, I got done being a summer cop in 2000, and I actually got a job at a gym. And then two nights a week, I was also working overnight security at a hotel. I mean, I was going to make a go of it. I liked the area. I wanted to stay down here. I was just trying to land a police job. So that’s kind of how I ended up in Salisbury City.

11:43
Michael Warren
It’s funny how that type of city influences everything in the city from the police department. I remember when I went to the conference, how cheap the hotel rooms were simply because there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic. So anything to get people there, they were willing to do to get some type of income going, you end up with the job that you wanted in Ocean City. When you came into Ocean City, what were you hoping to do? I mean, what were you hoping to ascend to? What were you hoping to get involved with during your career as a police officer there?

12:19
Vance Row
Man, I had two goals when I got to Ocean City. I wanted to ride a bike all the time, so I wanted to always be on a police mountain bike. I worked the boardwalk for every summer and even into my full time career, and I always just wanted to get around on a bike. I wanted to be on the full time bike unit, and then I wanted to be on the SWAT team because I always looked at those guys as, listen, this is the best of the best, and so I want to be a part of that. So those were my two goals, which I was able to achieve pretty quickly. So I got to Ocean City in 2002. I was on a bike immediately. I’d already been to bike school through Salisbury City, and then it took me two years to get on the SWAT team.

13:01
Michael Warren
For our listeners who don’t know what a police mountain bike school includes, because I also went to that school and it was actually put on by folks from the University of Michigan Police Department because they have such a big program there. I had to do things with a bike that I didn’t even do on accident when I was a kid.

13:24
Vance Row
Right. Yeah. That’s a tough school. And the one that still I have nightmares about and it terrifies me was riding down the district court steps.

13:33
Michael Warren
Yes.

13:34
Vance Row
Thank you.

13:37
Brent Hinson
You’re going to have to expand on this. You piqued my curiosity.

13:41
Vance Row
I almost fell off the back of that bike about six times just in that little short amount of time. That was probably like ten or twelve steps. All right, so bike school, it’s not just like riding a bike up and down. Some of the harder things that you need to do is you have to be able to ride through. They make this cone box, and I want to say it’s maybe 5ft and then 6ft. And you kind of work your way down. Like, you start in the six foot box, and then you work your way down into the five foot box, and you have to make a complete circle. And what you really have to learn how to do is be able to look in front of your front tire because if you look at your tire, you’ll fall down. So that’s one of the harder things that you have to do.

14:22
Vance Row
You have to ride up and down steps. So you have these parts where you have to ride up three steps and then ride down. Riding down is no problem. Riding up, I don’t like it. Jumping curbs, you know, all that kind of stuff. All right, so one of the guys that I looked up to as a summer cop, his name is Bret Case, he is now retired. He was a detective. When he left, I watched this guy who was a former football player. He was a tight end at the University of Maine. I guess he got done in, like, 91, 92 somewhere in there. Big dude. I mean, like six foot six at the time, probably 250 ish. And he could stand on a bike and actually jump the bike up onto a boardwalk bench. I mean, like, impressive. And I’m not a small person, but I never tried that one because I would cripple myself, probably trying to do that one.

15:15
Michael Warren
It’s funny, the things that you brought up were exactly the ones that I would have said. Learning how to apply brakes while still pedaling as hard as you can, so you can do that low speed. My mind was screaming at me, you’re fighting against yourself. You’re fighting against yourself. But that was what you had to do to get through the course. Yeah.

15:36
Vance Row
Not an easy course. I don’t want to do it again.

15:37
Michael Warren
No. When I first got the shorts, the undershorts, they got the big pad through there. Just getting used to wearing that, I was like, oh, man, this just feels.

15:48
Vance Row
Weird right here all the time. So we’re really pulling back the curtain here. I mean, I had the spandex ones and then they were actually built into my bike shorts, too. I had double the pad because, my God, ten to 12 hours on a bike, that doesn’t feel good in the undercarriage.

16:07
Michael Warren
The other thing that some people struggle with and shoot, I don’t even remember what the name of it was. The little things on your pedals that you put your feet into, that it kind of locked it in there, the clips. So that’s real good for maintaining control of the bike while you’re moving. But I remember watching one of our officers one night, they were trying to come to a stop and they couldn’t get their foot out. So all of a sudden, you just see them just fall right over on that. And when you’re rolling up on people that are maybe breaking the law, that’s probably not the entrance that you want to have to get back from them that you want.

16:45
Brent Hinson
That’s more Police Academy the movie than actually coming from the police Academy.

16:48
Vance Row
That’s right.

16:49
Michael Warren
But it was entertaining. It was entertaining for those guys and it was entertaining for me. Not so much for the officer that was involved in that. What was the primary use of the bikes when it came to department? What were they used for?

17:04
Vance Row
Sure thing. So in the summertime, we really have two districts. We have a Southern District and the Southern District works the south end of Ocean City, which is geographically not a very big area and predominantly that is handled by police bicycles. And then we have a geographically larger area which is considered our Northern District. And at the time that was about 130 streets and that was all handled by vehicles and stuff like that. So a lot of what I was doing was peace and good order crimes, disorderly conduct, alcohol violations. We have a lot of local ordinances and things like that we’re asked to enforce. So that’s really how I spent a good amount of my time. You have to be comfortable to interact in large groups of people and especially large groups of drunk people because I worked from 10:00 at night till 08:00 in the morning for a lot of that.

17:55
Vance Row
And I mean, ain’t nobody sober at that point.

17:59
Michael Warren
It’s a great tool, but it’s also a tool that perhaps some agencies use but they don’t train their people very well because it requires different tactics yeah, it does. Than if you’ve got a patrol car.

18:15
Vance Row
I agree.

18:16
Michael Warren
I mean, with a patrol car you’ve got some cover if there ends up being some type of use of force. With a bike, you’ve got a distraction. And I’m all for those tools. I just think that as a profession and I’m not speaking about Ocean City, I’m talking about as a profession, we just need to make sure that our people are prepared to deal with what they are likely to encounter when they use those tools.

18:39
Vance Row
That’s true. You are much more exposed the entire time you’re on that. When you’re in a patrol car, you’re certainly surrounded by protection, or at least perceived protection.

18:50
Michael Warren
Right?

18:50
Vance Row
Yeah, right.

18:51
Michael Warren
I did enjoy about the bikes was the readily accessible ability to speak with people that you were going past or coming up on. We’re in a patrol car you have to go through rolling your window all the way down and slowing down because you typically are going faster. And it really did seem to get our officers closer to the public than perhaps those in patrol vehicles.

19:14
Vance Row
Yeah, it’s true. That’s why I really liked it. You could really interact with people an awful lot.

19:19
Michael Warren
Now when you talk about boardwalk, are we talking about the traditional boardwalk with the pier that goes out over water?

19:27
Vance Row
We do. Yep. So we have a pier that goes out all the way at the south end of Ocean City. We have a bunch of rides like a carnival atmosphere and it know all the boardwalk foods like really good thrashers french fries and different types of popcorn and candy and stuff like that. And then as you walk up the boardwalk. All different kinds of shops, mostly like souvenir shops, t shirt shops, all that kind of stuff that’s right out on the boardwalk. I’ve always heard people say that it’s kind of like a carnival atmosphere that you have all the flashing lights and then you have the music. So it’s just like a bustling kind of atmosphere that’s going on. I mean, right up to like twelve or 01:00 almost every night. But I’ll tell you what, 24 hours a day, you will find somebody on the boardwalk.

20:15
Michael Warren
And that’s where I guess I have a little bit trouble understanding how hard it must have been for you to work there, because in my jurisdiction, were the host for the Michigan State Fair. So there was about a week period each year where we had that carnival type atmosphere in this geographically situated place. And we use bikes a lot there because you can get through a lot easier than even with like a golf cart or anything like that. But when you’re talking about you’re doing that thing over and over again and it’s routine feeling for you. But the people who are there, that’s probably their one week of vacation that they’re there for that year.

21:00
Vance Row
That’s true.

21:00
Michael Warren
It almost seems like it would be. And Brent, I hate saying this, I think it’d almost be like being a roadie at some point. If you’re going on tour with a band, no matter how much you like the band, when you’re on Show 22, you’re probably tuning some of that stuff out that you were listening to at the beginning. So as an officer, how did you make sure that you weren’t tuning out the things with all the flashing lights and noise and giggles and good smelling food? How did you make sure that you were staying aware of what was going on? To make sure that you were safe and that the public was safe?

21:37
Vance Row
We constantly would have to kind of have reminders in our roll call sessions and have little side conversations with each other, just maybe like little pep talks at times. Because what I will share with you is we don’t work 40 hours weeks because it’s a busy resort town, because there’s always people here. We were working 50, 60 hours weeks. And complacency is where you get problems and when you’re tired, you’re just like, I don’t want anything to happen in front of me, but you have to stay alert. So we would kind of have to have these little pep talks with each other. Maybe you even have to have them with yourself at times just to kind of encourage, hey, look, don’t let your guard down. And I agree with you that everybody that comes, I mean, they spent a lot of money to come down for Ocean City for maybe a weekend, maybe a week.

22:30
Vance Row
So it’s incredibly expensive. And then when they come down to the boardwalk. Maybe they only take one or two nights of that, so they definitely want to have a pleasant experience. So there’s a part of us that there’s certainly a part of me that was enforcement, and then there was also a part of me that was like Ocean City Ambassador. Kind of like being able to say, yes, here’s where you can find this, and the beach is right over there, and all those kinds of things.

22:59
Michael Warren
Have to admit, I misspoke. I said, there’s a lot of people doing these things. And the truth of the matter is the majority of the people where they’re just there for a fun time, often with their families. Yes. And your job is to make sure that they have a safe time, and that’s dealing with the people that perhaps drink too much or come down for nefarious reasons.

23:22
Brent Hinson
Basically, you’re Dalton in roadhouse. That’s what it amounts to. You just got to okay, all right.

23:30
Michael Warren
On a bike in shorts with padded stuff inside. That’s all.

23:36
Vance Row
Just the one.

23:37
Michael Warren
I’m glad you brought up the work week thing, because as much as you wanted to work on a bike, working 50 and 60 hours weeks and incorporating the bike into that had to wear some on your body.

23:50
Vance Row
Oh, it sure did. We have special events, and we have all different things that happen, especially Memorial Day, a little before Memorial Day, and then all through June, we have successions of senior weeks, so we’ll have three or four of them a summer. And there gets to be a point where your fuse starts to get a little short because you don’t have much rest. You might be on your 6th day of six, and maybe you’re going to have one night off and then you’re going to go back and you’re going to do it again. I mean, listen, it’s great and all to get that amount of money, but your body is just not rested. And that’s stuff that I learned later on in my career, I just thought that was what I was supposed to do, that I’m just supposed to work my ass off.

24:43
Vance Row
My wife used to call herself a summer widow because she wouldn’t see me for the better part of two months. That from the middle of May till the middle of July, she would sometimes come into work just so we could see each other and just so we could have dinner, because we’re like ships in the night. But that’s just the way it was. And I don’t know that I knew any better. So that’s just kind of how I went about it.

25:08
Michael Warren
It has to be incredibly hard. As I said at the beginning of the show, the previous ten days I was on the road, nine of them. So that one day I had to get everything done at the house that needed done. I need to do laundry because I had to repack. I need to visit with my wife and my kids and needed to do work around the house. And it can be hard on a family. It can be hard on a family even if you’re still coming home, because really you’re only coming home to shower and to get some food and to sleep, that has to be hard on a family life. And when it’s hard on a family life, that can make it hard on the work life too.

25:46
Vance Row
Oh, 100%. And I know people will always say, well, you can’t bring your personal life to work and you should never bring your work life home. But the fact of the matter is they bleed both ways.

25:55
Michael Warren
Absolutely.

25:56
Vance Row
We are not robots and you can’t just leave that stuff behind. It’s always going to go both ways. And I mean, I would bringing home the work stuff pretty constantly, my wife and I, so we didn’t have kids, so we never had kind of like the coparenting part, that component of trying to watch them while working shift work and stuff like that. But she had a normal people job, so she worked like eight to five Monday through Friday. And everybody else that I knew at that point, we all worked shift work. We all worked like an evening shift or a midnight shift or they worked in the bars and Amy was the only one that worked like a normal human being and the rest of us were know, whatever. So she was always like, oh, we’re going to go out on a Tuesday night. Yeah, because that’s the weekend for us.

26:49
Michael Warren
That’s prime time right there. That’s when I could get away from the job. But you know what though? Some people would say that not having kids made it easier. But I would propose that at least for her, it made it more difficult because it can get incredibly lonely when all of her friends, their spouses, their significant others are with them and you’re out working, you’re doing what you do just for extended hours and at goofy hours of the day.

27:19
Vance Row
And she kept herself busy, for sure. She always has had hobbies, she’s always had a very good friend group. And some of those are police related, some of those are not. So yeah, she actually made her mind up at very early in my career. She’s like, I’m not going to worry about you overnight. I just can’t because I need to make my peace with the fact that you’ll take care of yourself and you’ve got a bunch of friends that work with you that will take care of you too. Because otherwise she was going to worry herself sick and never sleep.

27:46
Michael Warren
That’s a great outlook. Right. You know, that’s the kind of stuff that really should be taught to family members in our police academy.

27:54
Vance Row
Yeah, I agree.

27:55
Michael Warren
So that family members coming into the business, the family business, they know. That there are coping mechanisms for it. Brent talked about some back injuries you had. What can you share with us about those and how they impacted you?

28:11
Vance Row
So I hurt my back twice. And when I say hurt it, I ripped the bottom two discs in my spine. So l four, l five, s one. And I did it twice almost a year to the day. Once in October of eight, once in October of nine. Not work related, either one of them.

28:29
Michael Warren
So there’s no good stories.

28:31
Vance Row
Well, the one that I really get hurt on in 2008, I am playing flag football on our FOP flag football team and I am chasing somebody down and I thought I tore my hamstring. That’s how bad it hurt in the back of my leg. And I sat on the sideline for a little while and it turns out by the next middle of the next day, I couldn’t sit up because just the pain had gotten so bad. My back is so bad at that point that I can’t stand for more than like 10 seconds to the point where I was living on my living room floor on a futon mattress that we put out there. I will tell you that the best thing that came out of that injury was I watched The Wire from beginning to end, and I did it pretty quickly because I didn’t have anything else to do.

29:24
Vance Row
I didn’t want to have surgery. I mean, I was like in my early thirty s at that point. And what everybody always said is, nobody has one back injury and nobody has one back surgery. So once you have them, you’re going to start having them all the time. So it takes me the better part of four months until I can get even back to a light duty. I think I was on restricted duty then for like another six months till they’d let me wear a belt again. So it took almost a year to come back and two months later I do it again. Now, this time I had surgery. And the surgery happened the day before Thanksgiving in 2009. And it was crazy because right after the surgery I could sit up and I was like, this doesn’t seem right, but I was fortunate that time.

30:05
Vance Row
That taught me a lot of interesting things. It sucks to be hurt. There’s one, it’s pretty lonely at times because you’re kind of out of sight, out of mind. And I had a couple of friends that would stop by. I had one friend in particular that would bring over munchkins and coffee me, and we would do that at least once a week.

30:27
Brent Hinson
I had surgery before. I know what you’re talking about. I had surgery before and I would lay in bed, my wife and my son would leave for the day and it felt like I wasn’t a part of normal life anymore because I was.

30:36
Vance Row
Home rehabbing my wife would. So she would like anything that I was going to eat or drink. She would try to put it in one spot and just be like, what do you want to do today? And she would try to make it where I don’t have to go very far to get it. And to be honest, I didn’t want to eat or drink anything because if I did, then I’d have to go to the bathroom and I’d have to move to get there. And I didn’t want to move because I was in that kind of pain to the point where they were doing like steroid injections just trying to get me back. The surgery helped tremendously. And then I have gone to a chiropractor ever since, and this is still, what, 15 years later? I go every two weeks. I just went this morning.

31:18
Vance Row
And it’s maintenance because I want to keep everything in check.

31:22
Michael Warren
It’s funny how one’s perspective changes throughout the course of our life, because as I have gotten older, some might say old, I was with my twelve year old at football practice, and we share a field with one of the other teams, and the field was wet because it rained. And I watch his coach on the other team and he’s returning kicks, they’re practicing special teams. And all I could think to myself was, that’s how old men get hurt right there. They try running and doing things. Their mind thinks that they’re 25. And all I could think, it had nothing to do with the play. That’s how old guys get hurt. And so I would imagine then that it had to be somewhat the same for you once you get back to work after you’ve had your surgery. Hey, you know what? It’s happened to me twice now.

32:17
Michael Warren
And people always say you never have just one injury and you never have just one surgery. How did that start to impact the way that you looked at the job and the way you did the job?

32:26
Vance Row
So I will say that I wasn’t ready to come back until to the point where I didn’t think about it anymore. But I will tell you that I felt like I had really good PT people that were putting me through different paces. I played football for a lot of years of my life, all through high school, all through college, and I’ve had like a handful of minor injuries. Nothing like what I had when I got into the police world. And that was always the thing that our athletic trainers would kind of work with. They don’t want you to think about it, and they want you to move as if it never happened. And that’s kind of where I would get with my back. Every once in a while, I would feel a little like twinge and I would get all hot and sweaty and be like, oh my God, it’s happening again.

33:13
Vance Row
But I feel like I also had the tools to try to keep it in place now. Yeah. And I take a little bit better care of my body. I didn’t realize that probably all of those years of football probably had an impact on me and all of those years of law enforcement wearing a duty belt, wearing that vest, tackling people. I was never good on my body, so I am certainly more aware of that as I moved to the middle part of my career and late into my career.

33:46
Michael Warren
So you made some changes then post surgery to try and prevent that thing from happening again.

33:52
Vance Row
So I was big when I was playing football. I was 330 pounds when I left college. I was an offensive lineman. There was a point that my friend Bret Case guy was talking about before he gets into running. So I was like, all right, well, I’m going to get running too. And we both had done the Atkins diet at that point, so were eating like bacon and eggs all the time. We both got super skinny. I was at a point I was down to like 210 pounds, but I could run forever. So we would run like three and 5 miles at a clip. And then I had this goal. I was like, you know what? As a former offensive lineman, I’m going to run a half marathon because I don’t know why. So I did that in 2004. I ran the Baltimore Half Marathon. But listen, once I ripped my backup twice.

34:36
Vance Row
I don’t run anymore. I can’t. I used to play basketball on a pretty regular basis. I used to play like that, flag football. My wife all but forbid me at that point from playing any more rec team stuff.

34:50
Michael Warren
I heard Gordon Graham speak a few months ago. Gordon Graham’s, famous law enforcement speaker on risk management. And he’s an older guy, retired CHP, and he gets up there, he goes, I got one thing to say to you, f running. That’s right. That’s what he goes. You know, it does positive things for you right now, but the long term issues that it creates, your joints and your back and everything, it’s just not worth it. There are better alternatives. And yet we look in police academies and what’s the primary cardio?

35:26
Vance Row
Everybody’s got to run them all the.

35:27
Michael Warren
Way, and it’s done every day. And we have things like that right there. We have medical studies that have shown the long term problems that regular wear of the duty belt can do to our people, yet we continue doing it and it’s like, if there are other ways, why don’t we change so our people are healthier longer?

35:52
Vance Row
I agree with you, and it’s funny you say that. So like twelve years ago, I was on our joint labor management team, and I brought up one of the first things, because I had hurt my back, you could only wear suspenders at that time if you had already hurt your back. And I’m like, why are we doing this as an afterthought? Why do you have to get hurt first? Why can’t we do something that’s preventative? And they were like, you know what, I like it. And then I guess I went crazy because I was like, what about outer vests? And they were like, no.

36:27
Michael Warren
It’S like you asked for their first born.

36:29
Vance Row
So listen, fast forward and honestly, the answer that was given to me is no. We’re a resort town. We can’t look like that. Okay, so you’re worried about the image and not the people that you have working for you for 25 years. Super, thanks. So as of this year, all of our cops are in outer vests.

36:48
Michael Warren
Nice.

36:48
Vance Row
So it only took eleven years.

36:50
Michael Warren
With your football background, when you look at offensive linemen today, nearly every one of them are wearing these knee braces. And they do that not because most of them have had the injuries, but because they’re trying to prevent the injuries.

37:07
Vance Row
Yeah, a lot of it’s preventive. They don’t want them to come sideways and crack each other’s knees.

37:13
Michael Warren
Exactly. But you couldn’t wear suspenders until you’d already been hurt, which made you more susceptible to getting hurt in the future. How much could we have prevented if we would have had just that little change? Right. Tell me about how it is that you ended up leaving law enforcement, how you retired.

37:32
Vance Row
Sure.

37:32
Michael Warren
Because as I understand it, you weren’t ready for it. It wasn’t planned.

37:37
Vance Row
No, that’s right. So in late 2016, I was actually riding my police bike during a special event weekend. And I unfortunately hit a crack in the sidewalk and I flew over the handlebars and I whacked my knee on the concrete. What that did is it tore my patel tendon, which I didn’t know at the time. And I just thought I just had like a bump and a little bit of road rash. So I got back up and I just kept on working and I made it like another 2 hours and then my leg locked and I was like, uhoh so I did something bad. Fast forward. I go to the emergency room that night. I end up having reconstructive surgery on my knee about three weeks later. And the lasting thing that happened as a result of the and they’re not sure if it’s from the impact of the fall.

38:28
Vance Row
They’re not sure if it’s from the surgery or the rehab or the immobilizer. But for whatever reason, I have nerve damage in my perennial nerve in my knee that’ll never go away. And what that does is it makes my left foot burn all the time. And if I try to wear socks or shoes or anything compressive over my left foot, it exacerbates it and it starts to pound and throb. So it’s actually easier for me to be in like bare feet or flip flops, which I guess as Ocean City cops, we could probably be in flip flops because we’re beach cops. But unfortunately, no, that wasn’t working out for me. So about three years later, my workers comp claim ends, and the police department and the town didn’t really know what to do with me at that point. And I just kind of sat in this limbo for the better part of three more years.

39:18
Vance Row
So it was last summer that our new city manager, his name is Terry McGeen, came up with a suggestion because I had proposed that I buy out my last three years and I just retire now. And he said, I would like to make you a dispatcher. I want to keep you in the pension system. I don’t want to lose you as a city employee. And, I mean, that was nice to hear, for sure. And I have started a whole nother life. So I’m still, as part of my public safety career for the town of Ocean City, I just happened to go and be a police and fire dispatcher. So I’ve been there for about a year, just past my year mark, and I’ve been doing a lot of police dispatching. I am new to fire dispatching, so I’ve just been doing that over the last month.

40:02
Vance Row
So just trying to learn everything. So I can do anything in the room that if somebody calls out, if somebody’s sick, that I can jump in and I can do anything.

40:12
Michael Warren
We had a recent episode where we talked about how people often struggle making a transition from their dream job, their career into some other job, whether it be civilian side or whatever. And it’s difficult enough to make that transition when you’re planning for it. And this happens a lot in our profession when people are forced to transition because of injuries or that type thing that can play havoc on people’s minds.

40:40
Vance Row
I agree.

40:41
Michael Warren
Listen, I came into this right here to be the police. There have to be times where you sit there and say, man, this right here, this is good, but this isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t what I saw myself doing 22 years in.

41:00
Vance Row
There’s an interesting point here, and what I want to share is I talked about the amount of hours that I was working. And in the later part of my career, the way I finished my police career was as our polygraph examiner. I was our first one. I was the one that built our program. I had an incredible amount of work to do, and it was mainly applicant work. I was working those 60 hours weeks, not just in the summertime anymore. I was doing it in the winter and then through the spring, and then I would still go back to patrol and I’d still work it. So I was doing it like eight or nine months a year. So, interestingly enough, in June of 2016, I come home on like a Sunday morning. I just worked all night and I said to my wife, I don’t think I can do this.

41:43
Vance Row
I’ve I’ve just about had it. And at that know, you had the working hours. The attitude about police had dramatically changed. Freddie Gray had happened in Baltimore City like a year prior to that. I didn’t have the best relationship with my supervisor at the time and I was drinking an awful lot just to try to cope with that. So be careful what you wish for because in June of 2016 I wanted to leave the Ocean City Police and in October of 16 something bad happened. Now it takes a couple of years beyond that until I actually realize it, but again, be careful what you wish for because I did leave. It just took me five years or six years to do it.

42:26
Michael Warren
Go back real quick just so people have an understanding.

42:29
Vance Row
Sure.

42:30
Michael Warren
Polygraph examiner. Just the basic school on that is incredibly intensive and long, isn’t it?

42:37
Vance Row
Yes. Twelve weeks. So I went to school for twelve weeks on an army base in the middle of Pennsylvania and I mean, it’s the hardest school I ever went to. And were so terrified that weren’t going to pass our first test. And by pass you had to get an 80% or better. And I mean we didn’t sleep and I think the first test was ten days in and I remember thinking, oh my God, I can’t fail this test. I cannot go back to Ocean City with my tail tucked between my legs. They were going to laugh me out of the room. So it’s like this thank God I passed. Right.

43:12
Michael Warren
But my whole point with that there was a lot of personal and professional investment in that right there, but yet but still you reach that point, it’s like, listen, I can’t perform like this anymore because of the impact it’s having on me.

43:28
Vance Row
And what I didn’t mention to you, I told you some of the other things that were going on. So what I didn’t know getting into polygraph, everybody has seen stuff on TV and there’s the great big detective that’s banging on the desk and shines the bright light into somebody’s face. Tell me the truth. Well, that’s not really how it goes, folks. Anyway, so what I didn’t know is I didn’t know how many times a my polygraph test was turned into a therapy session where somebody would end up telling me something that they had never told anybody else. Like something had happened to them at some point in their life and it, I mean, some pretty awful things. And then I didn’t realize how many people would voluntarily tell me some of the bad things that they did and against their family, against people in the neighborhood, stuff like that.

44:23
Vance Row
That’s the stuff that started affected me. Listen, everybody has a funny story about a dog and a jar of peanut butter. Fine. And we can laugh and things like that, but the stuff that people were doing to their own family or the things that they were doing to people or the things that were being done to them, that stuff started to internalize on me. That really started to bubble up in me.

44:47
Michael Warren
There’s both a blessing and a curse to a pension, because you’ve got this year mark that you need to reach in order to draw it.

44:58
Vance Row
That’s right.

44:58
Michael Warren
And that’s a goal, but it also can kind of seem like a prison when I’m not there yet. But I recognize that I need a change.

45:06
Vance Row
That’s exactly what I’ve called it before. It’s almost like a prison sentence where you actually look at a calendar every day and you mark an X across the day, and this is a job that you are dying to get. And then you get to this maybe ten or 15 year mark, and you’re like, well, I can’t leave now because I’d be stupid. And you’re just like, I don’t want to be here.

45:29
Michael Warren
I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to. So Brent and I actually had this discussion before as it relates to our know it’s such a dangerous thing to be looking for. Man, I can’t wait till Friday. I can’t wait until the end of the week. I can’t wait until summer break. But then you waste all those days in between, and they’re gone. And I don’t know, man, it’s so hard. But you got all this stuff going on. At what point does yoga come in to the picture?

46:03
Vance Row
Okay, so I told you a little bit about what was going on in my life in 2016, and then I get hurt. So at the conclusion of kind of like, my injury wrapping up, but I know I’m not going to be a cop anymore, but nobody seems to know what to do with me. My life kind of started to spiral out of control because I felt like at that point, like I had lost my purpose, and my drinking got absolutely out of control. Nobody knew. My wife knew just because she would see me passed out on the couch, but nobody at work knew. Like, I wasn’t missing deadlines. I wasn’t missing any work days or anything like that. I didn’t smell like a brewery or anything like that when I was going to work. There’s a point that she confronts me, and that happened in November of 2019.

47:02
Vance Row
I had tried to quit drinking a couple of times, and I’d make it like a week, or I’d make it like four weeks. This had actually been the longest I had stopped. I had stopped for six weeks, and were having a staycation with some of our friends, and I thought, hey, I can just have a couple of drinks. Well, it turns out I can’t. And I mean, blackout drunk, two straight nights. My wife, this is the first and only time she ever did this. She actually was taking videos of me and some of the silly antics I was doing, which was like a private dance party and swimming. I laugh about it now, but when she confronts me now the next morning, and she’s like, we got to talk about this. And, I mean, I was so deeply embarrassed. I’m like, I don’t ever want to have this conversation again.

47:50
Vance Row
I don’t want to feel like this. Funny enough, something I’d never thought about it was maybe up until a year ago, somebody said, man, she really took a risk, because what if you went the other way? And what if you were like, I don’t have a drinking problem. I can’t believe you’d even say this to me. I mean, I certainly respect your opinion. We’ve been together for more than 20 years. We’ll have our 20 year anniversary in April, so I don’t want to have that conversation anymore. So I’m like, you know what? I’m not going to drink today, and then I’m not going to drink tomorrow. And it actually started to become a game to me, like, all right, how long can I go? And people would ask me, you think you’re going to drink again? And just because I didn’t know what to say, I would be like, maybe.

48:34
Vance Row
So it’s not for probably two years that I’m actually comfortable talking about it. And at this point so in November, it’ll be four years I’ve had a drink. Thanks. What’s? Nice. Now, because I didn’t do the traditional AA route, I just kind of white knuckled it at times and was just like, I’m just not going to drink. I’m just not going to drink. And I wouldn’t be in a bar. I wouldn’t be around it.

49:03
Brent Hinson
But you bring up a good point, because it sounds like you were able to do your job while drinking. And I would assume there’s a number of people out there that are functional alcoholics that are able to get their jobs done, but they’re killing themselves.

49:17
Vance Row
Oh, 100%. And what I’ll share with you is, listen, when I look back on it, I had a drinking problem long before 2016. I did not drink a healthy amount. Like, I couldn’t get enough. Now, it always made the night fun, but there gets to be a point, and this is where it became started to get, like, borderline dangerous is 2018. I’m taking some pretty high powered medication because of being hurt and stuff like that, and I’m still drinking that way and still to the point of blacking out a couple of days a week. So, yeah, no good was coming of that. Okay, so you asked about yoga, so here goes. Within a couple of days of that, I actually go to my first ever studio yoga class, and I had never been in a studio before. I had done it as part of rehab, and if you’re familiar with the P 90 X series?

50:17
Vance Row
That was the first yoga I ever did. And oh, my God, if you’ve done that, it is not relaxing. It is not Zen like in any way, shape or form. It is a brutal workout for 90 minutes. Anyway, so I thought that I couldn’t go to a yoga studio. I am a former football player, former cop. I’m six foot four. I’m 270 pounds. All I’m going to say is I stand out when I go to a yoga studio.

50:43
Brent Hinson
Now, yoga pants alone, I go, right?

50:48
Vance Row
But, I mean, listen, I got nice legs, so enjoy the show. Anyway, so I go to my first one, and I’m like, this is incredible. And it’s within 30 days that I come home and I tell my wife. I’m like, I’m going to teach this to cops and to firefighters and military like people like me, because I’m not going to get them to come with me to go to a yoga studio. So I have to come to them. So that means I got to learn how to do it.

51:18
Brent Hinson
Okay, I’m going to stop you right there. I want to stop you right there, because I hear people say it’s great. Tell me why it’s great. So people listening, including myself, can understand what the draw is, because I want to understand. I really do.

51:35
Vance Row
Okay. All right, so here goes. I can give you a couple of different things, all right? I’m going to start with the physical stuff. Physically, it’s going to make you stronger. It’s going to make you more mobile, more flexible. Now I’m going to talk to you about the mental benefits. This is the life changing thing to me. It allowed me to get rid of all these negative emotions that I’d been carrying around, all of these feelings that I had, all of this stuff of self doubt, all of these I was really beating myself up at the time. It allowed me to start being able to get rid of that. It allows you to start living in your present moment. So a lot of our problems are because we’re living from the neck up. It’s because we keep worrying about things that happened ten minutes ago, ten weeks ago, ten months ago, ten years ago, or you go the other way and you worry about shit that maybe never happens ever in your life.

52:30
Vance Row
Maybe a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Look, all that becomes important in the practice of yoga is right here, right now on that mat. And it’s very hard to let your mind start to drift away when you move through some challenging poses. Now, the power of your breath is really where it comes in. Your breath is the bridge between your body and mind. The reason that we live in the past and try to live out into the future and don’t live in the present moment is because you’re all wrapped up in your own mind, using your breath, bringing yourself back into your body, noticing how you feel, noticing where you’re carrying tension, deliberately breathing and using this purposeful movement. It starts to allow you to get out of your head and get back into your body. That’s the magic.

53:20
Vance Row
Now, to be fair. Listen, a yoga class is wonderful, okay? Especially if I teach it. Just Saying. But where the real magic happens is when you take that when you’re in some pose that maybe I’m twisting you up like a pretzel. And I’m asking you to use your breath and I’m asking you to maybe lean into that discomfort. It’s when you take that mindset and you take it off your mat, and the next time that you’re in the source of a conflict or you’re in the source of something that feels like you’re stressing out, that you start to use your breath to be able to down regulate your central nervous system to be able to use your breath to slow your heart rate down, to slow your brain down. Because that’s when you’re going to make good decisions. You’re not going to make good decisions when you are in your sympathetic nervous system constantly.

54:09
Vance Row
And that’s the problem when you’re so amped up all the time, when you have a fuse that’s like an inch, you can’t make good decisions and you’re going to be constantly reactive. So yoga calms all that down by tapping into your parasympathetic nervous system.

54:27
Brent Hinson
All right, so people are listening right now and they’re saying, yeah, but how can you combat the? Yeah, but I’m too old. Yeah, but I’m out of shape. Yeah, but I won’t learn it properly. How do you combat that? Because I know that’s what sure they’re saying right now, my head.

54:43
Vance Row
All right, so the practice of yoga is so beautiful because it will meet you wherever you are. And maybe listen. Everybody says, well, I can’t touch my toes, so I can’t do yoga. I don’t need you touch your toes. And maybe you reach towards your toes and listen. Maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe you touch, like your pointer toe down to your big toe for the first time and you get really excited about it. Listen, there’s all kinds of ways that we can do this from a chair. There’s all kinds of ways that we can do this. If you’re missing a limb, yoga will meet you where you are. It’s all about breath work. It’s all about a little bit of deliberate, intentional movement, and it’s really good for your head.

55:23
Michael Warren
It seems to me that yoga, that perhaps and you just used the word that one of the best words to describe it is intentional. And that’s one of my favorite words. I mean it’s intentional breathing and intentional thoughts and intentional movement. But I will kind of echo a little bit what Brent said. So what would you say? To somebody like me who has considered taking it up but is scared about going in there and looking like an idiot because I don’t know the phrases and words and stuff they’re saying.

55:57
Vance Row
Okay, well, so if you want to and I offer this to anybody, I would be happy to teach you through zoom for your first class just so I can break down some postures for you and tell you what to understand. Now, most yoga teachers are taught pose names in Sanskrit. I don’t use a lot of Sanskrit because I don’t want to lose you. I will use probably the English translation of it, but I actually go one step farther than that. I don’t just call pose names. What I like to do is I’ll tell you to look at your foot, and I want you to turn your right foot towards the top of the mat. I want you to bend your right knee a lot. And then once I get you there okay, this pose is called and then get you to really learn it. What I’ve found, and this was not my intention when I got into this, was I just kind of fallen into teaching a lot of beginners.

56:57
Vance Row
I like to be people’s first time because I know if you take a class with me, you’ll come back because I’m not going to lose you. And I play music that you’re going to recognize. You might even start singing along because God knows I do sometimes. But it’s not about standing on your head. It’s about some breath, little bit of movement and a lot of mindfulness. That’s really where I’m going to go with it. For anybody that’s listening, if you find maybe just a regular yoga studio that has a beginner class, there’s your ego. So my first ever studio class was in a hot yoga studio, which I loved, but I am a sweater, so I was a puddle at the end of that class. I mean, I love it, but I don’t know that everybody else is going to want to do yoga in a 90 to 100 degree room.

57:53
Brent Hinson
Please tell me you play Bend Me, Shape Me, Any Way You Want Me by American Breed on the playlist somewhere.

57:59
Vance Row
All right, well, I’m hearing a request here, so that means in your first class. We’re definitely using that one. I just made a new playlist last night. It’s all like 70s funk music, and I don’t know, I just kind of.

58:11
Michael Warren
Felt right as we’re wrapping things up here. This was a few years ago when I was getting ready to turn 50. I told my wife, I said, hey, I feel like as I’m reaching this stage in my life, I need to expand who I am and what I am. And she goes, what do you mean? I said, Well, I’ve come up with some things that really are outside my comfort zone that I’m considering because I want to continue growing. And she goes, all right, well, what are you talking about? I said, well, number one, I was thinking about learning how to play the guitar. And I said, I was also thinking about getting a body piercing, and I was also thinking about maybe getting a tattoo, but I was also thinking about maybe taking up yoga. And she goes, okay, the body piercing is out.

58:55
Michael Warren
I said, oh, thank goodness. I said, because it’s just like if you have a multiple choice test, there’s always a throwaway answer, and you got it right off the bat, so we’re good. And she goes, I’m not so sure about the yoga. And I said, you know what? I’m kind of doubtful about that too, because I don’t think I could pull off the yoga pants. I’m not built for yoga pants. And she goes, I think you should learn to play the guitar. And I said, well, that good. That’s a twofer. And she goes, what do you mean? I said, you can’t play the guitar without a tattoo. So I get both of those things right there. But in all seriousness, at this stage of my life, one of the things that I’m concerned about because of all of the physical trauma and the mental trauma from our career, I think that being more flexible and being more mobile would be good for a man my age.

59:43
Michael Warren
And then you add in the whole mindfulness piece. It seems like now that I’ve reached the stage where I have reached the pension, that I want to enjoy it for as long as possible. And it seems like that this would be a good tool for anybody, but especially those that have been in law enforcement to ensure their health and mental well being long after their career is over.

01:00:08
Vance Row
So there were some studies that were done. And I remember when I went through my supervisor school, and that was in 2012, my group decided were going to do something with wellness. And this is before Officer Wellness was really like a buzzword or anything like that. And the most disturbing thing that I saw in that I still just can’t forget is like, the average police officer lives five years after retiring. Can you fathom? I mean, spending 25 years devoting your life, pouring your blood, sweat and tears into your agency, and what do you get? Five years. That sucks. I really want people to thrive in their retirement. Listen, you worked your ass off. So I heard somebody say this once, and I love it. I want you to bankrupt your municipality. I want you to live so long into your pension that they are like, we still got to keep paying this guy.

01:01:07
Michael Warren
I want them to change the rules because I’m so logged into it, you.

01:01:10
Vance Row
Know what I mean?

01:01:12
Michael Warren
I’m sorry about the people for future generations, but I want there to be a Michael Rule. But also I think there’s a big importance in recognizing there’s a difference between surviving and the word you just used was thriving in our retirement years. And it seems like that yoga is helping you to thrive. After two back injuries, after a knee injury that turned into a nerve injury, a career change, it seems like you’re thriving with what you have, and this is one of the big pieces that’s helping you do it.

01:01:49
Vance Row
If I don’t find this, I’m not sure where I would be. Yeah, I mean, certainly drinking was a big part of it, but if you can’t tell, I’m incredibly passionate about this, and my wife would tell you and pretty much anybody that knows me, well, I don’t do anything a little bit. So, I mean, I’m all in on this, and I want to teach this to law enforcement officers. I want to teach it to firefighters, military. The underlying current of this, the reason why it becomes so important to me is because of the suicide rates in first responders in the military. And, I mean, they’re especially bad in law enforcement. They’re especially bad with military folks and that’s know, I like to use the practice of yoga and maybe people don’t totally understand that correlation but when you start to kind of get out of your head and you start to try something that’s maybe a little out of your comfort zone.

01:02:50
Vance Row
Now, Mike, the way you change in anything is that you have to do something that you’re uncomfortable with. That’s the only way we’re going to grow. If you keep doing the same thing, if you keep staying comfortable, you’re never going to grow. You should sign up for that yoga class, like, this week.

01:03:10
Michael Warren
That’s what I worry about becoming. I worry about my mind becoming stagnant. I worry about my body becoming stagnant, and that stagnant is not a good word to team up with retirement life. You know what I mean?

01:03:23
Vance Row
That’s right. So now is the time for you to this is the way I describe it is you should do the stuff that lights you up right now. When you talk about it, you’re going to go learn the guitar. It lights your heart up, and you just start to smile, and you’re like, oh, my God, I can’t wait to play Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven.

01:03:46
Michael Warren
Yeah.

01:03:48
Vance Row
I don’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. I had the flash of, like, Wayne’s World from the 90s.

01:03:56
Brent Hinson
No Stairways.

01:03:58
Michael Warren
But if people wanted to find out more about the stuff that you do, how can they find out more about that?

01:04:05
Vance Row
Easiest way is through my website, and that is yogaescue.com. And that’s got all my contact info. That’s got all my contact info. It’s got my phone number, it’s got my email. And you can directly contact me through the website. I am on Facebook. I am on Instagram. And what I’ll do is, if it’s okay with you guys. I’ll send all that to you.

01:04:28
Michael Warren
Absolutely.

01:04:29
Vance Row
And then you can maybe post it with the episode notes or something like.

01:04:32
Brent Hinson
That right there in the show notes.

01:04:33
Michael Warren
So folks can find you. Because I would be willing to bet that there’s a lot of people out there that are like Brent and I that are interested, but we’re perhaps more apprehensive. That doesn’t outweigh the interest. And so it seems like you would be a good person to talk to.

01:04:50
Vance Row
I got to tell you, the next thing that I really have on my plate to do is I want to start making some short videos and put them on a YouTube channel because we don’t live around each other, so it’s not like you’re going to come to the studio and practice with me. I mean, we can certainly do something through zoom or something like that if you guys want.

01:05:11
Brent Hinson
But I want to make more accessible.

01:05:14
Vance Row
Maybe ten or 15 minutes videos, right, for everybody else. I’m not going to make 60. I mean, I’ll make a 60 minutes, but most times people are going to be like, I don’t have an hour. So if I just make ten or 15 minutes videos, then I can share that with other people and they can kind of maybe see, because I think that’s part of it. I try to share stuff on my Instagram that is like, look, this is the kind of stuff that I’m doing. These are the kind of poses and stuff like that. I try to break stuff down just to show people, because I think people get in their head and they’re like, this is what I think it’s going to be. And it’s not is my point. Like, I’m not going to bang a tambourine. I don’t wear robes, and I don’t chant, ohm for an hour.

01:05:57
Michael Warren
There’s no incense or anything like that.

01:06:03
Vance Row
I try to keep the hippie dippy stuff to a minimum.

01:06:06
Michael Warren
I’m just going to say roll call yoga. That should be your video series right there. That ten to 15 minutes deal right there that they could do at a roll call or on somebody’s lunch. You and I, we can talk trademark later, but anyway okay. All right. I think that’s a great idea. Fantastic idea. Hey, man, we appreciate you taking time to be here today, and thanks for reaching out to us.

01:06:31
Vance Row
Yeah, it’s great.

01:06:31
Michael Warren
It was good talking with you again.

01:06:33
Vance Row
Awesome, and thanks for having me.

01:06:35
Michael Warren
Hey, Brent, seriously, I’m intrigued, man, because I’m serious, I think that I would be much better off all around if I had something like this to help me along.

01:06:46
Brent Hinson
It’s like anything that you don’t know. It’s like that initial. You just got to try it. Once you try it, you become invested in it. I have to say, Vance was very open, transparent, and I think that lends itself to people buying into what he’s talking about, and he’s being very genuine and honest. So I hope people that are listening that maybe came into this episode thinking yoga is just for this bunch, that they really hear his story, and they say, no, maybe this can help me. So seriously, go to the episode page, find out more information about him, and do the thing. Don’t just talk about it.

01:07:23
Vance Row
Do it.

01:07:23
Michael Warren
Absolutely. And just throwing a couple of things out there. We can talk about tactical yoga. We can talk about trademarking that, because people more willing to do that, and maybe some yoga pants with Molly attachments to it. Just don’t buy this is an idea factory. Brit just saying.

01:07:43
Brent Hinson
Thank you for telling us, in your words, why it’s been so beneficial, because I think people really do need to hear that kind of thing.

01:07:50
Vance Row
I agree. Thank you. I appreciate you guys. Thanks.