I ran really well yesterday. For the past couple of days I’ve been doing my 6 miles in 41 minutes. This is my standard ‘good’ time. If I’m really killing myself slowly I can get a 40 minute, but only if I’ve prepared according to my standard kind of routine. Yesterday I got 43 minutes. They say that athletes are superstitious when it’s noted that someone has a particular preparation routine or style of getting ready, but I don’t think they are. I think that people get ready in a particular way because your body needs to get ready in a predictable way and once you start exercising you adapt to work with the way your body is prepared. If I go running and I haven’t stretched properly, then I have problems with my feet and that would just lead to problems with my knees which is not good.

Normally when I’m getting ready I listen to some music on iTunes to get into the speed of breathing. It sounds strange but I have to get used to breathing fast enough to keep up with the speed my legs are moving. Some people breathe in time with a song, or have a particular song running around their head that they run ‘to’, as in, ‘I was running to Jamelia today’. Others like Paula Radcliffe count while running to give you something to concentrate on instead of just breathing in and out. I found out yesterday that just breathing is tough enough for me: I’d never tried counting while running before, and it’s hard to count and run! How dumb must I be that I kept losing count? I’d say 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 43, 44, 45….. 58, 59, 60. I seemed to be able to count in twenty for so numbers at a time, but then I just lose it somewhere and kind of forget where I was and start at 83.
Not being able to multitask like this doesn’t slow me down, it’s just odd that I can’t do both at one time.

The other new thing that I tried yesterday was breathing as though I was in a swimming pool. You know how, when you’re swimming crawl, you have to suck in air when your head is out of the water and then physically push it out under pressure when blowing out? You can’t just let the air drift you of your lungs because by that point all the competition would be miles in front of you because they’d have taken in two more lungs of air by the time you broke the water again. So you push the air out so that your lungs can take in a new fix of oxygen. This is what I tried while running. It makes me feel a bit weird, blowing out when I run, but I can’t really say it didn’t work. Thing is, I didn’t prepare right. I ate a yoghurt about an hour before running and for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I can’t eat anything for 3-4 hours before I run if I’m going to do at all well. I normally get a stomach cramp if I’ve had food, so I just go without and I can gorge myself when I get home and have caught my breath.
I don’t think the idea of superstition is all made up. I think part of is mental and emotionally getting the body ready, but some of it is also physiological; the body needs preparation and some sort of routine for the demands of extreme exercise. Whether ten miles in an hour is extreme or not I’d debate, but without preparation I’d think it rather dangerous.

Superstition keeps athletes safe, so long live OCD.

Popularity: 1% [?]