Pace does not matter
Gather pebbles; don’t try to lift boulders. Yet.
One of my new athletes reached out to me with concerns. We’ve been working together for only a few weeks, and since he wasn’t use to a consistent training routine, and certainly never trained with a Breathing-As-Primary-Focus approach, I’ve been keeping his runs at easy efforts. He said, “I’m focusing a lot on breathing and staying consistent, but I feel like I’m getting slower with my pace even staying at a regular [7-Step breathing pattern]. Idk if I’m doing something wrong.”
Here was my response: “Here’s a hard concept to wrap your mind around: PACE DOES NOT MATTER RIGHT NOW.
Your body does not know ‘pace’, nor does it care. It knows EFFORT. A 7-Step pace should feel very comfortable; if someone were to join you, the two of you should be able to carry on a conversation with full sentences.
This means you are below your first ventilatory threshold, or the point at which your body starts to think things are getting difficult to manage. This is where the magic happens. Because the effort is reasonable, the body doesn’t have to spend a lot of resources cleaning up the mess a hard workout leaves behind.
This means that the body is able to RECRUIT resources (as opposed to deploying resources). In response to this effort, your body is signaled that there is more to come, so it starts to pack the muscle fibers with extra mitochondria, the powerhouses of the muscles. More mitochondria mean more capillaries (vascularization) throughout the muscle beds, which brings in more blood, oxygen, and nutrients, and can clear away toxins faster.
This process takes WEEKS to fulfill. This is why we’re easing into things. The hammerfest workouts are up ahead. You need to be physically prepared for them PRIOR to attempting them, or your body will just get stuck in repair mode.
Gather pebbles; don’t try to lift boulders. Yet.”
His response: “I love the way you explain things. I need to relax and stop expecting everything to just happen. It’s never been that way but I always want to make sure I’m pushing hard enough to get better too.”
The need for validation of our efforts is a powerful desire, and needed for our mental well-being. But modern society has created a need for instant validation for every little thing. That’s not reality. We have to do the work, day in and day out, mostly in obscurity, before it’s our time to shine.
As the Substack writer Maalvika says, “Everything worth having lives on the other side of effort.
Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.
The people who understand this most deeply are often the happiest, because they've made peace with the beautiful burden of nurturing. They know that the dishes exist because they've been eating good meals all week. The laundry piles up because they've been living a life worth getting dressed for.”
The Breath Runner Method is all about nurturing our physiological needs by maximizing the power of our breath — physically and mentally — in order to create the foundation upon which we can build a sustainable run training “career”. We don’t just want you to win (however you may define it) the race, but we want you to win at life.
Breath Runner — it’s like running on air!
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