I ran 5 miles this morning in 38:18. My legs felt a little stiff and tight at the beginning, but that slowly went away. I practiced my alternative forms of breathing again, trying to see if it really makes a difference. The basic idea of my new breathing technique is that I shape my mouth like an "O" and try to open up the back of my throat like I am singing, with the hope that it will open up my airways. Early on in the run the HR was 132 while running uphill at about 8:10 mile pace (probably worth about 7:50 on flat ground). This was the first time that I have seen my HR this low while running uphill. I didn't believe my count at first, so I counted the HR again for 20 seconds instead of 10 and got the same result (my HR monitor broke a few weeks ago, so now I just check the HR manually). About midway through the run I checked the HR on a mild uphill segment of trail because I realized that I was no longer breathing the way I was at the beginning of the run, as I was focusing more on breathing deeply rather than opening up the airways. My HR was 144 which tells me that what I am doing with the breathing really is what is fixing things, because the HR spiked when I did something different. I noticed that my throat felt tight until I started trying to open the airways again, but once I started focusing on opening the airways, my HR dropped once more. When running downhill I measured my HR as low as 126 on a few segments, but it generally stayed around 132 just like earlier as I was running a little faster. As I was getting to the end of the run I decided to see if I could still maintain an open airway even when running fast, so I sped up for 1:35 and took the HR at about the 1:00 mark, and again right as I started to slow down. I am not sure how fast I was running, but the HR at 1:00 was 162, and at the end it was just a tiny bit higher, maybe 165. I will take it as a positive that the HR was under 170. I finally am starting to feel like things are getting back to normal. I think that I will run 5 miles again tomorrow to be sure that I am maintaining things without regressing before trying to increase the mileage further. | 