Sometimes I hit my rowing machine really hard to try beat a previous record, so hard that I really feel like I've "cooked myself", I feel like I need to breathe to the point where I have to remove my ear buds to get more air or else it kind of feels like I could suffocate :) It's a brutal machine. I'm now fitter and rarely get that "gassed" even when I push myself.

It's such hard work that I decided to stop drinking for a year to make it more tolerable to exercise with the rowing machine.

One of my friends tried to beat my time on the rower and was so sore for 3 nights, he had nightmares about the rower ha.

Anyway, it obviously made me question should I be doing more for my body, including breathing exercises, but what this kind of thing also makes me really think about is how stupid air pollution is. What it would feel like not to have access to fresh clean air and how bad it would be to be suffocating. What a privilege it is to be able to breathe and it makes me feel like I want to go plant trees.

Has anyone else had similar thoughts during exercise / breathe training? If anything I think it's good to become aware of the breathe and air for this reason alone, it would make the world a better place.