Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

BREATHING Breathing is critical no matter what you’re doing, whether it be meditation, calculus, or boxing (beginning fighters first learn how to breathe so they don’t exhaust themselves by panting). One of the most important things you can do as an ultrarunner is to breathe abdominally, and a good way to learn that skill is to practice nasal breathing. Lying on your back, place a book on your stomach. Breathe in and out through your nose, and try to make your stomach rise and fall with each breath. When you succeed in doing so, you’re breathing from your diaphragm rather than your chest (which allows you to breathe more deeply and efficiently). Once you’ve mastered that, try nasal breathing (in and out through the nose) while you’re running easy routes. For more difficult runs, like hills and tempo workouts, breathe in through the nose, then exhale forcefully through the mouth (akin to what yoga practitioners call “breath of fire”). Eventually, you should be able to breathe through your nose for entire easy runs and to inhale nasally during the less strenuous sections of even 100-mile runs. I experimented with nasal breathing when I was training for the Western States 100, and it helped me become more of an abdominal runner. Nasal breathing humidifies and cleans the air. As a bonus, it allows you to eat quickly and breathe at the same time, whether running easy or hard.

Breathing