how did i chop 1-1/2 minutes off my 4-mile pace? hell, this was only my 3rd run in the past week. i haven't run at this pace since i did 3 miles almost a month ago. what happened?

i ran like the Tarahumara. and like a yogi. who are really two aspects of the same idea: hold your body correctly and breathe correctly, and everything else you do will follow naturally.

i can't go into depth right now, but in listening to "Born to Run" and having read about "barefoot" running, i've been trying to find a better way to run. i love to run, but i'm excellent at not running. and now that i have been running regularly for about 2 months, i've been frustrated to see my times hover around the 12:40 mark. it's not the pace; it's that the pace shows how difficult running has been. and my biggest problem is breathing: i simply couldn't get enough air in.

i know how to breathe correctly. i started doing yoga over 30 years ago, and the first thing you learn in yoga is how to breathe. and yet no matter how hard i tried to breathe properly while running, it just wasn't working. i figured i just had further to go to get into shape, not to mention i need to lose the 20 extra pounds on my torso.

but today, setting out to run 4 miles, i was determined to watch two things as i ran: that i landed on my whole foot — not the heel, not the toe, not the ball — so that my foot could absorb the shock and pronate naturally. the second thing was to run upright.

and that's the trick.

in yoga, you're never told to keep your back straight; that's an unnatural, harmful posture for the spine. what you are told to do is, as you breathe in, is to lift your chest. it's almost an exaggerated motion: breathe down into the diaphragm and, as your lungs fill from the bottom-up, you literally lift the sternum up and out. at the same time, your hips/pelvis face forward, and you sort of tuck your tailbone up — nothing extreme, just a very slight rolling back-and-up of the hips to maintain the S-curve of the spine.

do this when you run, and you run like a Tarahumara.

for me, it was nearly miraculous. suddenly, i realized what i had been doing wrong. somehow, as i had been run the previous weeks, i had been hunched over on myself. not a lot, but just enough to cramp my diaphragm and prevent myself from breathing fully. it was as if i had a constrictor band around my belly. today, with my body straight and my inner mechanism uncramped, i could simply breathe properly.

and i roared forward. it was so great!

the foot-strike part will be harder. i've been practicing the breathing for years; today i just made a slight adjustment that came easily. unlearning a lifetime of wrong running: that's going to take a while. but at least i'll be able to do so with enough breath in me to keep going.