Belly / Synchronised Breathing Seems To Work

After scouring the web for info on how to cure my side stitch, I realised that most people agree that it's from poor breathing, combined with pushing above your fitness level, or being dehydrated, or loads of others things you shouldn't really do when running.

I sought some advice from my sports physio brother-in-law. He said to exhale sharply as the right foot hits the ground for a right-sided stitch.

Another potential fix is to belly breathe. This involves not just expanding your chest while breathing, but expanding your whole torso to include your abdomen and move your diaphragm.

Finally I thought I'd try to keep my left leg a bit more straight by using a bit more energy and not allowing it to just flop naturally where it wants.

So I went out, started slowish, but still at a decent pace, concentrating on trying to breathe with my belly which just doesn't feel natural after getting into a high chest breathing habit and also getting used to just breathing how and when I need on demand.

Going up the hills I realised that belly breathing is a lot better for effort. I just seemed to zip up them without working too hard. It wasn't long before I got the side stitch threatening, but it kept as a niggle rather than taking my breath away. I then started to try and get a rhythm of of exhaling on the right foot landing, but that was very difficult to do at first because one breath was about 10 steps. Eventually I got it into a 4th step rhythm so it was

sharp exhale-----slow inhale--------------sharp exhale
right-------left-------right-------left-------right-------

This pace kept me strong for the last few miles and the frequency of the breathing was actually too fast for the pace I kept naturally settling into.

The left knee also held up with only a slight niggly feeling, but by 5.5 miles normally, I'd be really feeling it.

With how strongly I finished, I'm now confident of getting close to 1:30 for the Great Birmingham Run. 0:06:50 per mile is going to be hard to keep up but it's quite a flat course until about the 11th mile where there's a longish climb. By that time the race will either by on track or not anyway. I'm hoping a few KG off over the new couple of weeks + the final training +the event + the draft + the energy, caffeine and water, push me over that line.