I went on the trail late in the morning and under caffeine
and jogged for about five miles. I observed something
interesting about breathing, which reminded me of books
including "Body, Mind, and Sport" by John Douillard,
mentioned in both Scott Jurek's book "Eat and Run" and
Tim Ferriss's blog post "The Painless Path to Endurance."
Only today's observations took my understanding a little
further. Reading might have planted the seed years ago.
I have stopped using a watch for a while. I had a Garmin
Forerunner whose belt snapped after a couple of years. And
the cheap Casio watch afterward gave out for the same
reason. The watches still worked; the attack came from
the belts. Replacing the belts were not cheap and I couldn't
help but speculating that this was vendors' not-so-elegant
way to make profit. As my kid said: "Everything is rigged, Dad."
When I run, I often count steps and breaths--five steps
inhaling and five steps exhaling--the entire time. Normally,
I would slow down oxygen consumption when I start to struggle
with keeping the pace. That is, I would lower the number of
steps per in-or-out breath (SPB) from five to four.
Today, inspired by Wim Hof's hyper-ventilation, instead of
lowering the SPB, I did four or five fast breath cycles when
the pace felt hard to maintain. That instantly put me back on
an easy five SPB pace. The extra oxygen boost made
everything easy and I finished the run in good shape.
Looking back, it is obvious. There are two ways to go once
a pace is hard to maintain--increasing oxygen supply
(hyper-venticalting) or cutting consumption (in the form of
a lower SPB). Both work. But in certain sports, e.g., grappling,
one cannot afford slowing down. One must keep up with
the pace. That is where hyper-ventilation comes in and that
is what BJJ Masters are great at.
For running, intermittent hyper-ventilating should make it
more enjoyable, if nothing else. I am glad the connection
was revealed to me.
