Eighty Steps to 150: Mark Bowler’s Breath Hold Challenge

A musician, composer and former smoker, Mark Bowler reversed early sleep apnoea and nose-breathed his way through a half marathon. Then he documented all 28 days of the Breath Hold Challenge in public — and found the real shift wasn't in his lungs.

From the Armchair to the Water

Mark had kept up a loose, personal pranayama practice for around 25 years, folded into a wider yoga practice with no real theory behind it. Then, around 2017, he and a friend got curious about freediving — strictly from their armchairs. Comparing breath-hold times led them to breathwork schools built around hyperventilation, and Mark practised several times a week, pushing his breath-hold times steadily upward. Then, just as steadily, they began to contract. No one could tell him why.

Looking for answers, he read James Nestor's Breath and realised he'd been a mouth breather since his teens. The follow-up he picked up was Patrick McKeown's The Breathing Cure — bought, he admits, partly out of curiosity about something in it called "LSD breathing," which he half-expected to be some transcendental practice. It wasn't. What he found instead were answers to the questions he'd been carrying for years, and a clear way to improve his own breathing.

The Switch

Mark moved to nasal breathing day and night. His snoring and the early stages of sleep apnoea disappeared. Running nasally was harder won — but within days of making the change, his estimated VO2 max had jumped a couple of points on breathing alone. He was sleeping better, enjoying exercise more, and noticing his daily stress and anxiety ease.

Wanting to share what he'd learned, Mark trained as an Oxygen Advantage® Advanced Instructor, qualifying on 1 April 2024. He came away confident in the method and part of a community he's still in touch with today.

Eighty Steps, Then One Hundred and Fifty

When Mark took on the Breath Hold Challenge, he decided to document every single day of it publicly — partly gentle self-accountability, partly to show how functional breathing exercises fit into a busy, ordinary life. Not everyone can find an hour a day to practise, he reasoned, but most people can find seven to ten minutes, especially when it only takes you as far as the hallway or the back garden.

His first Maximum Breathlessness Test landed at 80 steps — a number he's certain would have been lower if he hadn't first watched Patrick breeze through 80 in a demonstration video. That told him something other than a physical ceiling was at play. The real shift came later, once his counts climbed past 100: air hunger would rise, as it always does, trying its hardest to make him take another breath — but then it plateaued. It didn't keep intensifying. Eventually he stopped treating it as a contest between himself and the feeling, and simply let it be a feeling, nothing more. He hit 150 steps on his final test.

80 → 150 Steps on the Maximum Breathlessness Test, Day 1 to Day 28

20+ Years Smoking and early-stage sleep apnoea, both now behind him

20km+ Comfortable nasal running distance today, after a nose-breathed half marathon

Of the five strategies he teaches from the challenge, rest between rounds is the one he calls foundational — without it, he says, the others fall apart. But the biggest personal difference came from the psychological reframe, which he found could change things from day one.

Pure Breath, Bedford

Mark's background is in music and composition, and performance anxiety is now one of his specialities — a direct line from his own experience on stage to the clients he works with. He's also a former competitive archer, another discipline built on staying steady under pressure. He runs Pure Breath in Bedford, working with clients online and in person, and hosts a free, donation-based online group called Breathing Buddies every Thursday, built around gentle downregulation and working with tolerable air hunger.