Breathing Practice
The last couple days I've been practicing breathing. While most people seem to get by just fine without thinking about it, I do better when I take some time to focus on it.
To clarify, I'm talking about breathing while I'm climbing. Generally speaking, my rasping gasps elicit more concern about a pending aneurism than about my ability to inflict pain on others. Keeping it measured and deep allows me to go much further up a hill before the lights go out. The deep breathing might sound odd to those around me, but I'm wearing lycra and have rivers of snot running down my face, so what do I care?
Instead of focusing on a point up the hill and ripping my lungs out to get there, I'm just concentrating on keeping everything under control. It still hurts, a lot, and may be slower in the short term, but I'm not faced with collapsing into a heap when I reach that otherwise meaningless point and can pedal strongly past the next one too. All because I'm breathing. Who knew oxygen was a performance-enhancing substance?
All of this will likely go out of the window in the opening moments of a race, but at least once I'm dropped by the nose-breathers I can salvage some sort of dignity- if a man in lycra has any.
To clarify, I'm talking about breathing while I'm climbing. Generally speaking, my rasping gasps elicit more concern about a pending aneurism than about my ability to inflict pain on others. Keeping it measured and deep allows me to go much further up a hill before the lights go out. The deep breathing might sound odd to those around me, but I'm wearing lycra and have rivers of snot running down my face, so what do I care?
Instead of focusing on a point up the hill and ripping my lungs out to get there, I'm just concentrating on keeping everything under control. It still hurts, a lot, and may be slower in the short term, but I'm not faced with collapsing into a heap when I reach that otherwise meaningless point and can pedal strongly past the next one too. All because I'm breathing. Who knew oxygen was a performance-enhancing substance?
All of this will likely go out of the window in the opening moments of a race, but at least once I'm dropped by the nose-breathers I can salvage some sort of dignity- if a man in lycra has any.
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