I got my first taste of sauna on a family vacation at the (mostly shabby) chic town of French Lick, Indiana, in the late ’80s, home to the once-glamorous West Baden Springs and the birthplace of legendary Celtics forward Larry Bird. The condo we rented for the weekend had an indoor cedar sauna, which no one in my family seemed very excited about. So I sat there alone, for a half-hour, wrapped in a towel, reading a sci-fi YA novel until the pages came unglued from the spine due to the intense dry heat.
Even to my tortured preteen soul, the sauna felt like a quiet and relaxing refuge from a stressful world. But it wasn’t until I moved to Russia in my early twenties that I really fell in love with saunas—or, as it’s called in Russian, banya (баня).
So, when my local infrared sauna studio in Boulder, Colorado, CYL (short for Change Your Life) advertised a summer special—60 days of sauna for $199—I signed up with the intention of going five times a week for the next two months.
The Sauna Experience
Humans have been sweating in traditional saunas since around 2000 BC. The earliest known…
