writings: ARTICLES
Lessons from an Edge Player, by John Howard
"Who the hell is this guy Ian Jackson?" That was the way one of my fellow Ironman competitors expressed his intimidation before the start of the 1981 event. Jackson had announced his confidence of a win in the press, and given the infantile level of the sport back then, nearly everyone could be considered a threat.
Because we were worlds apart, I was especially intrigued with his creative approach to cycling. I was submerged in physical prowess, while he dealt in the metaphysical and sublime. At first, when I won the event and Ian finished well back in the field, I thought I had the edge, but later I came to realize I had only scratched the surface of the broader field of human performance. I got my chance to work with Jackson during a seminar we were conducting at a boy's prep school in Tennessee.
The subject of this program was the concept of turning sports sense into life sense. While I mind-boggled the kids withmy forty-hour-a-week preparation to set the twenty-four-hour cycling endurance record, Jackson dealt with an idea he called "BreathPlay" and how the body-mind connection had fueled his race.
Never mind the fact that he didn't even race; the students empathized with him and let loose a barrage of questions about the mental part of training and racing. This was a perfect lead-in for Jackson to connect the breathing with his favorite subject--hypnosis, and its power to eliminate unconscious performance blocks. He spoke highly of his teacher, Milton Erickson, M.D., whom he believed was the world's foremost hypnotherapist. He concluded our session by hypnotizing the entire audience.
We had the afternoon off, and I was intent on pumping Jackson about this hypnosis thing. He seemed intent, though, on diverting my interest to BreathPlay. "Experience teaches better than talk," he said. I was resistant. Only because I felt obligated did I let him coach me in basic BreathPlay on a bike ride. The fact was that I had developed a successful approach to cycling and had no desire to fix what already worked. I listened halfheartedly to his explanation.
He started with what he called "Upside-Down" breathing and had me explore switching from the usual pattern of sucking air in and letting it out to the Upside-Down pattern of pushing air out and letting it in. It felt unnatural. Like most people, I was so used to sucking my air that it was difficult to let the inbreath just happen without working at it. Jackson was a good teacher; he had his skill so finely tuned that it was easy to see where the exercise was taking us. He made his breathing clearly audible so that I could catch what he was doing. He made a smooth hissing or whooshing sound as he breathed out and an easy aaah as he breathed in. He had me watching closely from the side of the road as he pulled his belly way back with that hissing outbreath and then let it round out with the aahing inbreath.
The real clincher was the way he rode away from me on the hills with each extension of outbreath. Once I was reasonably familiar with Upside-Down breathing, he led me through some explorations of the Switch-Side breathing, comparing the technique to shifting gears on the bike. The sounds of the rhythms of the breathing, he explained, were like gears that would help
accelerate the early learning.
We started with a 3/2 out/in rhythm, counting each pedal stroke like a footstep and putting steps in the breathing sounds to make a clear connection between the breathing and the pedaling. We fit each outbreath into three pedal strokes by putting three steps or stages in to the outbreath sound: "hisss-ssss-ssss." We fit each inbreath into two pedal strokes by putting two steps into the sound: "aaaa-aaah." I remember thinking there was something hypnotic about that recurring rhythm of sound: hsss-ssss-ssss, aaaa-aaah, hsss-ssss-ssss, aaah-aaah. It was a big help to have him right there with me, sounding out the pattern in perfect synchrony with each pedal stroke. I was able to get into the rhythm and feel the surge of extra power working right away.
After I'd tried the 3/2 (out/in) rhythm for a while, he had me try a few other rhythms, like 2/1 (out/in) for climbing hills and 4/3 (out/in) for a downwind section. This was powerful stuff, but I still found myself resisting. I fully intended to get back to my tried-and-true unconscious breathing that had worked just fine for me in the past.
I was looking forward to my next solo ride, when I was going to throw off this burdensome breathing baggage and simply work out. But when my next solo ride came, I found that Jackson's coaching had reached deeper into my subconscious than I had realized. I set off on a familiar circuit, looking forward to four hours of easy riding, BreathPlay-free. Instead, I found myself thinking about BreathPlay in spite of myself.
Within a few miles I was searching, as Jackson had suggested, for a rhythm that fit my work rate. When the variations in the workload were lower, I discovered I could stay in that same rhythm and simply change the intensity of my breathing. When the variations were more dramatic, as in hard climbing, I would shift down to a shorter rhythm, like 3/2 (out/in) or 2/1 (out/in). As the miles ticked away, the patterns became more complex.
I found the odd-count breath cycles (with an odd number of pedal strokes for each complete out/in cycle) would automatically balance the work of right and left legs. As I followed the rhythms in the pedal strokes, I got a certain satisfaction in noticing that each breath cycle ended on the opposite pedal from the one before. Jackson had predicted that as I got more deeply into the rhythms I would find that they would tend to wash away the pain of hard work. That turned out to be true: Not only were the hills easier than I remembered, I even found myself sailing over the top using the big ring, where before I had struggled with the small one.
A glance at my watch indicated that I had covered the usual four-hour course in three hours and forty-five minutes. Looking back at our first session in Tennessee, I now realize that BreathPlay was really the medium for introducing me to the deeper process of self-hypnosis. Two years later, after a particularly harrowing experience in Baja, Mexico, in which I narrowly escaped serious injury while attempting to break the bicycle speed record, I again sought Jackson's counsel. I had read Milton Erickson's book My Voice Will Go With You and I understood the BreathPlay system, but nothing could dispel the terror I was experiencing as a result of a near miss in Baja.
A lot of money had been spent, sponsors were waiting, the project needed a conclusion, and I was feeling the pressure. Using Jackson's hypnotic BreathPlay techniques in tandem with my own creative visualization, I began to make progress. Essentially, I eliminated fear at the unconscious level. The immediate result, I am proud to say was a Guinness world record of 152 mph in July1985, on the Utah Salt Flats.
I have applied those mind and body techniques to enhance my performance in every athletic contest I have participated in since that day on the Salt Flats. In Jackson's book The BreathPlay Approach to Whole Life Fitness, another of his students, Alexi Grewal, a 1984 Olympic gold medallist, states, "This breathing [method] is the most powerful tool that can be imagined." Researcher Daniel Wojta found that when he tested groups of both BreathPlay-trained and nontrained students, the trained group realized an average increase of 7.2 percent in the VO2 max scored and delayed their anaerobic threshold by two minutes.
Wojta's simple conclusion: BreathPlay increases endurance. As a successful elite master cyclist I harbor no illusions about my athletic ability. In terms of speed and strength, I have given up some ground, but the real excitement comes in the gain column. From a knowledgeable teacher, I have learned that the lessons of ultimate performance are as basic as breath itself.
"Copyright 2002 Ian Jackson. All rights reserved."