When ozone counts are high it's bad. I thought I was literally going to die because I couldn't breathe after doing a massive sprint on a high ozone day. I don't have EIA either.

When you ride/race you rev up your adrenal glands. This reduces congestion (hence they have pseudo ephedrine aka adrenaline in some allergy meds). When you stop riding/racing you calm down and the congestion comes back a bit heavier compared to when you were standing at registration.

One way to rev yourself up is to condition yourself so you respond to certain stimuli with an adrenal rush. It's sort of like when you meet someone new (meaning a love interest) and you're constantly amped. If you can replicate that through conditioned response stuff it can make a huge difference. This is assuming you aren't nervous/amped during a race. For many years I tried to do certain things going into a sprint (in training or in a race) so that those actions would trigger an adrenal rush. I'm not sure if I made myself think it worked or if it really worked but the end result was that whenever I did those brief things just before a sprint I was mentally in the game.

This is my understanding of why I cough etc. Any doc or EMT or other more qualified people feel free to correct me.