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(Enlarge) While a few onlookers peek around the curtain, Sarah Hoover performs a "full bow" pose during the Dec. 6 Mid-Atlantic Regional Asana Championship, held at the Bikram Yoga studio in Cockeysville. Winners of the local yoga competition now advance to a national event in Los Angeles. (Photo by 
Karen Jackson)

This past Sunday, it also earned a few blue ribbons.

More than 25 adults and children competed this past weekend in their respective divisions at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Yoga Competition at the Bikram Yoga Baltimore studio in Cockeysville.

The top two male and female winners will go on to the U.S. Yoga Asana Championship in Los Angeles in February 2010.

Yoga competitions were popularized in India by Bikram Choudhury, the creator of Bikram yoga and founder of the Yoga College of India.

Bikram yoga is also known as "hot yoga" because it is performed in a climate-controlled room heated to 105 degrees. For the Dec. 6 competition, though, the studio was kept at "regular" room temperature.

Competitors were asked to perform a series of poses in three minutes: five compulsory poses and two others chosen by the entrant. A panel of judges look for proper pose alignment and muscle usage, focus, breathing technique and grace in transitions, said Garner.

She called Sunday's event, "the most successful regional championship we have had yet -- we had a packed house with standing room only, about 150 people."

Winners of the competition were:

Men's division -- Zack Hines, first place; A.J. Carnaggio second; Eddie Garner, third.

Women's division -- Emily Vendemmia, first; Anne Marie Paul, second; Kelly Duncan, third.

Youth division -- boys Griffin Peddicord, first; and Dylan Istre, second; and girls Madeline Figlewski, first. Other honorary winners were Evyllen and Rose Singleton. The first- and second -place winners advance to the nationals; the third-place winners are considered alternates.

"The top three in each category were separated by fractions of points," Garner said.

Garner, 27, picked up yoga while living in New York working as a ballet dancer.

"I thought that yoga would be a 'New York' thing to do," she said.

In her first tournament, the 2005 New York Regional Asana Championship, she placed third.

Sunday's event drew together many yoga enthusiasts who know each other.

"It's a fun time to get together with your yoga 'family' and see what everybody else in the area is doing," said Becky Siegel, also a former dancer and veteran competitor.

"It says 'competition,' but you're not competing against each other," Siegel said. "It's more of a competition against yourself and an expo to show other people what you've been working on and what your body can do.

The Goucher graduate, 22, started doing yoga as cross-training for dance. Nearly four years ago, while studying abroad in South Africa, her professor taught yoga to the class out on the beach.

She's been hooked ever since.

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