Breathing and Running
Have you ever thought about breathing while you’re out on a run? Breathing seems straight forward, but it’s very important. If you don’t believe me try running without breathing.
We always talk about heart rate and its impact on training, racing and fitness, but we seldom talk about breathing, unless, of course, we are telling a grueling training or racing story where we end up ‘gasping for breath like a fish yanked out of the water’. (that sounds like one of the stories I’d tell)
Like I said above, even though we don’t’ talk about it, breathing is quite important. Without breathing we won’t get far.
Jack Daniels has done a lot of writing on proper breathing cadences. He even had his runners, at one point, change their breathing so they wouldn’t breath on ‘the same side’ all the time because he thought it caused imbalances and therefor injuries. But, he’s always been a bit technical for me.
Instead I like to see how it works in our own practice – yours and mine.
Let’s start with the mechanical basics to set the baseline and get it out of the way because it’s boring.
What’s going on when you breathe? You’ve got a set of muscles that expand and contract in your chest and torso. This brings air into your lungs and expels air out. In with the good, out with the bad. In this air we get our oxygen that our cells need to do the miraculous things that they do, like creating energy. (unless of course you’re in Leadville, in which case there is no oxygen in the air and you die on the trail, or at least miss the cut off).
Mechanically, we each have a volume of air we can pull into our lungs. As a runner, as you progress from novice to more-than-novice you increase the volume of air you can pull in. The whole system gets very strong.
The muscles get stronger and more efficient and the lungs get huge. In fact, before you became the excellent, much admired, endurance athlete that you are, your lungs were puny, sad, little things, now they are big and strong like Jack LaLanne or Arnold Schwarzenegger. No one will be kicking sand in the face of your lungs anymore.
That’s how it works. You don’t need any max volume formulae to see how if you have bigger, stronger lungs, you can get more air in and therefore get more power out of your body as it burns all that yummy oxygen.
Moving on from the mechanical to the thoughtful…
Why is there so little discussion of breathing in running. In swimming you talk about breathing all the time. When you’re swimming breath cadence and volume are extremely important. Competitive swimmers train themselves to be able to race hard without breathing. It’s a deficit training thing – you don’t want to know.
When I started training for triathlons figuring out how to breath while swimming was crucial to survival. My breathing technique progressed from drowning, to a 0-1 cadence, (where I swam in circles), to a 2-2, and finally to a 3-3 long stroke cadence that, frankly, is like meditation when I do it right and alternates sides so I swim in a straight line.
My point is, in swimming breathing is part of the technique, but in running it is often an afterthought.
Why do we measure heart rate and not breathing? Because, it’s not easy to measure breathing. Any old sports watch will take a stab at reporting heart rate, but you need a special treadmill rig or my friend Arnar’s smart garment to get a good breathing readout.
If you track heart rate and breathing rate they mirror each other as proxies for where you are vis-à-vis your aerobic threshold. You can use them both as performance predictors and training prescriptions.
It’s all interrelated. Your breathing impacts and is impacted by your heart rate and your cadence and your effort. It’s all one big ball of physiological performance spaghetti.
But practically what can you, dear accomplished endurance athlete, learn from your breathing?
First be aware of how your breathing cadence tracks with your effort. Count the number of breaths you take at different effort levels. You’ll find that when you’re doing slow, aerobic work your cadence will be a 3-3, meaning 3 foot falls for each breath, maybe even a 4-4. As you increase effort it will move to a 2-2 then a 1-1.
Second, play with it. Try different cadences. See what it feels like to run a 3-3, versus a 2-2, versus a 1-1. See how it effects your pace and your perceived effort. Try taking in really a big lungful and hold it of a couple beats before slowly letting it out. By learning about how your breathing is tied to your cadence and your perceived effort you can then use breathing as one of the tools to manage different racing and training situations.
When I used to do a lot of 1600’s speed work on the track I would inevitably get to a point on that 3rd lap where I would be battling the effort. I noticed I’d be gasping for breath. One of the ways I would relax back into the effort was to take a big inhale through my nose and blow it out hard through my mouth.
A couple of those will reset your perceived effort. Physically, what this does is to reset your breathing to a deeper, diaphragmatic breath. i.e. you get more air volume. Mentally it triggers your mind to stop panicking and relax.
The other thing I would like to connect the dots on is how similar the breathing you are doing on those easy runs is to the breathing techniques they teach in transcendental meditation.
Meditation uses a focus on the breath to relax your mind and move it into a different, meditative state. Due to the curse of western pragmatism they can’t help but enumerate and define these states into complex taxonomies, but I’m not going to subject you to that. I’m just going to summarize by saying that through these breathing practices you move into deeper and deeper states of consciousness.
As you move deeper, your thinking mind turns off its noise. Time stands still. You may even feel a bit of euphoria, like a floating, bodyless state. I would argue, at least according to my own paltry experience, this sounds quite like descriptions of ‘runner’s high’.
Having experienced both, I think the results are similar.
What is the benefit of meditation? Easing anxiety and tension, clearing the mind, enabling the creative mind. And what is the benefit of a good, relaxing long run in the woods? Easing anxiety and tension, clearing the mind, enabling the creative mind…(and perhaps some incidental nipple chaffing).
And, that my friends is the conclusion to this story. Running is mediation. And a big part of that is the breathing practice.
So your homework is to learn the breathing techniques used in mediation and play with them on your next run.
Since we recognize that running is meditation, why not practice it as such?