I'm here to close this loop.
After we found my breathing was way below normal we started yours truly on a steroid inhaler. At first we went with 40mg 2x a day (morning/evening). We did this for 5 weeks. There was improvement for sure but I still struggled when trying faster efforts. For example, I tried a 200 hard, 200 easy, 200 hard, 200 easy, 400 hard, 400 easy workout. I made it through 3 sets and I just couldn't do it.
So I went back to the doctor and we upped it to 80mg 2x a day. Since then i've shown solid progress. I did 8x400 at 70.5s and didn't start to really gasp until 7 and 8. Then I turned it around last week and did 10x400 at 70.5s with no gasping and did a 5k tempo earlier in the week at 17:15 which was preceeded by 4x200.
Thus I think it's going away. I believe after all these months that one of the biggest correlations with my bad breathing was the air quality. On days where the air quality was bad per airnow.gov I struggled. When I visited other states like New Hampshire, Colorado, or even headed down to San Diego, I would suddenly find myself breathing quite a bit better.
From here i'm just going to keep taking my steroid inhaler for the foreseeable future. I could careless if I have to use an inhaler if I run well.
I'm going to jump into a Turkey Trot and hopefully run like a 16:15 which would put me just 10s behind where I was before this entire ordeal began. And then focus on doing the best training I can do leading up to the Carlsbad 5000. Then I'm going to turn my sights to the Air Force Marathon next September.
I really appreciate all who commented and took an interest in this. It was a very emotional roller coaster ride this summer. I'm glad the ride is almost over, I've been waiting to get off of it for a while now. :)
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