Oh Everest, My Everest

I'm making decent progress in The Complete Book of Running for Women between classes, map-making and playing around on my bike during draughts of nice weather. I think I figured out my right hip issue that surfaced in LA! (I say that as if it were good news.) Kowalchik suggests an odd-numbered breathing pattern - something like 3 in, 2 out for easy running and 2 in, 1 out for speed work - because the impact is slightly greater on the exhale. It follows naturally that if you're landing on the same foot everytime you exhale, you'll start to feel the effects eventually... say, during mile 19 of a marathon you didn't train for.

Apparently most people naturally fall into a 3/2 breathing pattern and don't need to think twice about it, but breathing rhythm is something us 2/2-ers are supposed to be very concerned about. "It may take some getting used to," she says (and I must say that that's an understatement), but apparently it should be done. Only let's rewind for a second:



I need to re-train myself to breathe.



What? The notion is absurd for several reasons, but it is hard to ignore the evidence in my right hip. I'll take her word for it and keep trying.

Of course, I'm always too ambitious for my own good and I also learned a few pages before the breathing tip that there is an optimal range of steps taken per minute. It's what makes the elite, high-efficiency runners high-efficiency. I don't actually know how many steps I used to take in an average minute, but I'm sure it wasn't up in the optimal range. So before I even knew about my breathing problem, I had already decided to try taking quicker steps during my next run. Looking back, I am sure I should I have decided to correct my bad/sub-optimal habits one at a time. I just didn't think of it yesterday. It was a good day to run and I wanted to run. I also wanted to try out all of the neat things I'd learned, building good habits right away so that the improvements might show by October.

So it was that I came to try both correcting my breathing pattern and taking more steps per minute than I usually do. As expected, my little jaunt around the local lake was unnecessarily unpleasant because of this little experiment in stupidity. It went something like this:

in - two - three / out - two
in - two - three / out - two
in - two - three - and a half / out - two - three
in - two - three / out - two - three (DAMN IT!)
in - two - three / out - two
in - two - three / out - two
in - toosoon! / out - two - three
gasp - two - three - four - and a half / out - two - three - four
in - two - three / out - two - three (GEEZ)
in - two / out - two
in - two / out - two
try - again / next - time
take - more / steps - now
breathe odd / la - ter
I - hate / run - ning
in - two / * sigh * - ... - .... - and a half
gasp - two - three / out - two - three
gasp - two / out
gasp - two / out - two
in - two / out - two
ad infinitum

COME ON. Was it all the trumpet playing in high school? Did I not play enough pieces with changing time signatures? Did the few I played make me dizzy? Help, I've fallen into an eternal 4/4 piece and I can't get up!

Labels: breathing pattern, cadence