Relax, breathe, and do nothing extra.

Hey, here's a cheap way to improve my performance! Give up photography!

No, that's not the point, although it may be helpful for me to define my rides as training or touring mileage:

• On the touring rides, I run on the joy of what I am perceiving. 
• On the performance rides, I run on the joy of what I am doing. 

Note that's an unordered list, with no value or preference attached to either option, generally speaking.

In the latter case, I can my improve my focus with Ian Jackson's Breathplay, according to an article on breathing in UltraCycling.

The key is to simply breath. Relax, breathe, and do nothing extra.

I'm very interested in finding out more about breathing. Seems to me it's key to my performance, but I don't hear much about it from the racers, trainers, and triathletes. Probably second nature to practiced athletes. I'm just an old lady who smoked tobacco for three decades.

Ian Jackson is talking about it, though. Traditional training is a metabolic process, he explains. Most training focuses on the metabolic foundation that strength comes from stress and recovery, and no pain, no gain. This kind of training "zeroes in on stressing the body metabolism in specific patterns of base and sharpening training routines. And through all this effort, how we breathe is taken for granted." But instead of enhancing performance, "over-reliance on the metabolic method often results in stale burned-out performance." 

Well, I hadn't got good enough yet to get stale, that's not the point of the curve I'm on. In any case, his Breathplay concept turns breathing upside-down to become air-pushing instead of air sucking. And maybe that's what I've figured out how to do, been forced to learn how to do in order to cope with acid emanations over the last several months. Sounds like the same effect:

With BreathPlay training, you learn to boost your pedaling power through finesse rather than force, so that while your wattage output increases, your heart rate decreases. With well-developed BreathPlay skills, riding faster and stronger becomes easier.

Easier. That's the word that always gets my attention.

Looks like Jackson's recommending lots of visualization. That's good and easy. Marilyn Phillip's experience was interesting...

The most powerful experience by far was the one I related to you recently, of giving shape and color to the burning sensation in my thighs, then experimenting with changing the color and working with my outbreath to intensify the color or change the shape of the sensation. After a few minutes, I began to feel a warmth at the base of my spine, which progressed to a burning, and then a feeling of tingling (something like a very intense tickle) as it rose up my spine. I began to laugh, and the feeling of fatigue in my thighs was replaced by a surge of strength. I shifted up two gears and pedaled ferociously for several minutes.

Well, let's see what I can do with my own body observations and imagination. There are good clues here, but I'm not sure I want to invest in a program.

Relax, breathe, and do nothing extra.

That's it in a nutshell.