Since April, I have run with my Garmin Forerunner 405. It has the capability to record your heart rate, something which I have neglected to try until recently. As I feared, the second I strap on the heart rate monitor, I become completely obsessed with my heart. I can't just listen to my body anymore and enjoy running. I feel instantly like a lab rat on a treadmill, incapable of seeing the world around me.
I have a few experiments in mind that involve using a heart rate monitor in the next few weeks, but I need a baseline before I can delve into that world. So this morning, I strapped it on and headed out the door. Right away I found myself worrying about my heart rate, loosing my breath and joy along with it. About a mile from my house, I began pounding at a 3% incline and it was ridiculously harder to climb that hill today than it has been in over a year. I checked my Garmin and my watch said 191bpm. That is CRAZY. My heart was out of control, my breath was so fast, I felt like I was hyperventaliting. It was time to reset.
Until I reached the very top of the hill, I would not even so much as glance at my watch. I steadied my stride, returned to nice short easy steps with a rapid cadence, maintaining a 9:00 pace, and ran more efficiently. Most of all, I returned to breathing only through my nose, something I normally do without thinking about. Now I focused solely on my breath.
I learned this technique mainly through natural childbirth. Belly breathing deeply through the labor pains helped me escape from the torment of contractions. If you truly focus only on breathing and imagine the air making a cycle through your body: in through the nose, down the diaphram, deep into the belly, looping back up through the outter lungs, and returning out of the nose, you can calm your entire body. I use this technique almost every time I run and today I abandoned it to focus on a stupid watch. For the remainder of that hill, I thought only of my breath, in and out deep and solid.
When I reached the top, I glanced back at my Garmin. Now I registered a steady 166bpm. I didn't slow my pace, nor did I take a break before checking my stats. Instead, I focused only on breathing deep and relaxed my body deeply all the way to the summit. I reduced my heart rate significantly with one small adjustment. Scott Jurek and other "Chi Runners" talk endlessly about the power of belly breathing. I believed in the technique long before I saw any numerical support and I would love to see more official scientific results on the matter; however I saw the change instantly.
I've had numerous conversations questioning the effectiveness and purpose of nose breathing. For me, one simple challenge is all it took to solidify what I already knew.
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