How often do you push yourself to endure?

While running my sprints at the Borah High School track Sunday afternoon, I made it a point to only breathe through my nose. See this about nasal breathing and its benefits!

Nasal breathing is still new to me, where I inhale and exhale air only through my nose. So on those 90 second recovery walks back to the start line of my sprints, I did my best to focus on keeping the air flowing in and out of my nose, and keeping any air coming in and out of my mouth to an absolute minimum.

Not only was it still relatively foreign, but I was also dealing with the uncomfortable sensation of my boogers being blown in and out of my nose every time I inhaled and exhaled, respectively.

My intent was to use this as a training session and learn something about my performance on the runs; I wanted to finish all the runs within 2 seconds of each other, and recover well in between them using nasal breathing.

I wanted to find out more if I was able to nasal breathe. In the end, I would venture to say that 98% of the time, my breathing was through my nose.

Because of my mindset that I had established before starting my training that this was going to be a learning lesson, I had to check my ego at the door, and not put stock into distractions, thoughts, or even the sensations of discomfort with my boogers being blown in and out.

I had to let it all go and be myself, be comfortable with what was going on, and be in the moment in order to truly improve my awareness and abilities.

For each of my 90 second recovery walks, the difficulty level of concentrating on breathing through my nose was high, and I would also venture to say that it was harder than the actual 15 or 16 second sprints down the 100 meter straightaway.

The fact that I had to execute the task of breathing properly through my nose while incurring stress on myself through those sprints turned out to the be real training goal.

I had to endure a lot in order to keep doing what I tasked myself to do.

My question is, how often, and what are you doing to push yourself to endure, like I did with this?