Counting breaths, Zen, and warm, bright weather

Melting!

Even though I have that 4 mile race tomorrow, I couldn't help but get outside for a run today. I was cleaning the house all morning, watching the temperature rise with each passing hour. The sky is so blue, and it's so bright outside because of the reflection off all the snow.

 Can't you just feel it getting warmer?

I ate some peanut butter on 7 grain sprouted bread (flourless), waited 45 minutes, tinkered with my Magellan, set paces with Runmeter and decided to run around the neighborhood. I wanted to practice a new breathing technique I read about in Runner's World last night. 3 breaths in and 2 out, one with each foot fall. The premise is that the diaphragm helps stabilize the core. 3 breaths in provides more O2, while causing the diaphragm to contract (stabilize), and the odd number grouping ensures that you exhale on opposite foot falls each time.(less stability) This limits potential injury, while at the same time getting you into a zen-like state. I've been there a couple of times (zen-land) during runs, but I've never been able to do it deliberately.

I tried it, and it took me over 2 miles to finally get it right, although I did not zen-out.  I tried all types of mantras - the one that finally worked was one of the ways the article described. "in-2-3,out-2" finally got me on the right track. Although the author goes on to say that it will be automatic after a while, I guess he means over the course of many, many runs. I really had to concentrate very hard, thus foregoing Zen.  But, I found that I was not as tired as I thought I should have been running the distance I did at the pace I ran it. 
(ummm, what? Can you restructure that last sentence, please?) 

I could have continued on comfortably, but I knew I had that race tomorrow, and figured I should cut it short.

Magellan ended up doing funky things again, somehow I selected multisport and running at the same time, and came home with garbage.

Runmeter Data