But because he also explains that it’s the exhale that matters more than the inhale because it clears room for fresh air-another revelation for me-I modified his recommendation slightly, exhaling for one more step than I inhaled.
Goater suggests timing your breath to your steps: inhale for three steps, exhale for three steps. If you think this sounds insane, or like total bullshit, I thought the same. The panting is a reflex it’s involuntary it’s just what the body does when it needs oxygen.” They think if they don’t gasp, they might pass out from lack of air. There’s a panic to the way they feel when they’re out of breath. If they’ve just charged up a hill, for example, or done some fast repeats, they have no choice but to heave and to pant. “You can breathe slowly and deeply in circumstances where you would have thought it impossible,” writes Goater, a former Cross Country national champion. The most befuddling of Goater’s tips is also the most useful, which is that you can simply chose to not run out of breath when you’re exerting relatively intense effort. (Though I can attest that both coaches would probably have advised me to listen to my body instead.) And when the training program they designed (specifically, by incredible Nike run coaches and delightful humans Rebeka Stowe and Jes Woods) said that I should drag my hangover out of bed that morning, that’s exactly what I did. So when Nike reached out to me earlier this summer to ask if I wanted to be on their media team for the Chicago marathon, I said yes, thank you, I’ll have another. Three months later, if you have the good fortune of staying healthy, you find yourself, miraculously, running farther than you ever thought you might. You find a program, you stick to it, day after day, week after week. It is one of the few things in life where you get out exactly what you put in. This is when I discovered the delightfully appealing-and somewhat addicting-linear progress that is marathon training. But, in 2018, on the cusp of turning 30 and feeling totally fine, not at all panicked, and in no need of proving I wasn’t washed, I decided to try to run the New York City marathon. Growing up, running was mostly a way to stay in shape for sports, or a form of punishment during practice for said sports.
If running 26.2 miles sounds bonkers to you, it did to me, too. But the truth is that when I ran my first marathon, about three years ago, I learned a powerful lesson, which is that completing a marathon is not easy, but it is simple-and it basically all comes down to consistency. Another eight was not going to make a difference. It was early October, and I’d run 301 miles since July. Which begs the question: Why didn’t I just sleep it off and skip the run? I had 13 of 14 weeks of training behind me, and was already well into the “taper” (the final three-week period leading up to the marathon where, after increasing your mileage for most of training, you run less and less to let your body fully recover). It was also the morning after the first night of a wedding weekend, in which I’d had more than a handful of boozy IPAs. Fortunately, when gastrointestinal revenge came for me, it wasn’t on the big day, in front of thousands of people, but alone on what should have been a casual eight-mile tune-up, eight days before. In the process of pushing your body to run 26.2 miles, it might push back-in some cases, by locking up your quads, or, in more devastating instances, by releasing your bowels. This is, of course, one of the great fears of any marathoner (and why you see signs on seemingly every course saying “don’t trust a fart”).
I was one week out from running my second marathon when it happened.