Kate Magolan encourages her students to incorporate movement into their lives.
A yoga and running instructor at the University of Idaho, Magolan said she owns a yoga studio with her husband Jakob, an organic chemistry professor at UI, and trains for road races whenever she has the chance.
Magolan said this is the first time she is teaching a credit course, although she taught yoga at the Student Recreation Center for three semesters and at the studio for three years. She is currently teaching Yoga Toning, Yoga for Beginners I and Road and Trail Running.
“It’s been lovely so far,” she said.
Magolan said she is excited for the running course, which has not been taught at the university before due to a lack of interest. She said since there are only 10 people enrolled in the course, she can make an individualized training plan for each student.
The Road and Rail Running class meets near the track for warm-ups, before running on one of the nature paths in the area and follows their individual goals, she said. Magolan said the class might run a 5K together this fall, as she knows some students have set that as a goal.
“It’s a really, like a nice team atmosphere,” she said. “We’ve got all levels, from beginner runners, to people who haven’t ran in a long time, to people who are training for a marathon.”
She said her students have expressed the desire for a second course, which is currently unavailable.
Magolan said she has been running since she was in the third grade, and ran competitively in both high school and at Queens University. She was prompted to stop due to a running injury she got in college. She said she got a job at the university which didn’t involve much movement, but she preferred to be active.
“I was in an office all day, sitting in a desk for, gosh, maybe like up to 10 hours some days,” she said.
To continue being active, Magolan turned to yoga. She said she learned poses by watching videos when she had nothing else to do. Magolan said although she originally made up for not running, she received the additional benefits of flexibility and relaxation.
Magolan said much of teaching yoga is helping people let go of their misconceptions about it.
“Often you think there’s an end goal to a pose, but there’s really not, there’s no perfect pose. It’s about just feeling the stretch,” she said.
Right now, Magolan said she is trying to reach 500 hours of training. She said the typical amount of training for a yoga instructor to have is 200 hours, and she currently has around 300.
“You can go a little bit more deeply into different sections of yoga, so my last one was yoga philosophy and meditation,” she said.
Attending yoga training also gives her the opportunity to travel. She said she took her family to Tofino on Vancouver Island at a previous event, and will go to California for training in yoga alignment this winter.
Magolan said she wants to keep people from injury and help them create a sustainable practice they can incorporate into their lives. She said not every style of yoga is the same, so if a student doesn’t like one kind of yoga, they can take another class with a different style.
Nina Rydalch
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