As a college distance runner, it was always a challenge to get acclimated for the heat during spring track season because the weather was often so cold that the first 80 degree day was a total shock to the body.
But it was also sometimes just as hard to adapt and adjust to sudden hot days in fall cross country meets. College meets were often held at high noon when the sun and warmth was beginning its peak. But there is really no time of day that dictates how heat will affect you. Mornings or evenings with high humidity and warm weather can be just as risky.
For example, a visiting team from a Minnesota college showed up at our campus in Iowa (75 miles to the south) wearing heavy shirts because the weather in the Gopher State had been 55 degrees and cloudy when they left. It was 78 degrees and sunny when they arrived. Wearing their cool weather uniforms, they started out fast and faded quickly in the heat. We really felt bad for them. Really.
Lessons like these should never be forgotten. But sometimes the basics of heat training and racing have to be refreshed or relearned. In certain cases they even need to be unlearned. But more on that at the end of this blog.
Here’s a quick review of the basics of preparing for and dealing with heat in your racing and training. Some of these are classic knowledge. But remember everything you know or learn has to be placed into context, and most importantly, everything you do is personal and specific to your own body:
- Racing in the heat requires a degree of repetitive stress under conditions similar to race conditions in order for the human body to develop appropriate response mechanisms, such as sweating enough to cool the body off.
- People also differ greatly in their ability to drink and absorb fluids, so the prescription for heat management that works for one athlete may have little benefit to another, so don’t trust the habit of a friend or anyone else to dictate how much you need to drink.
The goals of heat acclimation are specific and simple:
- Learn your body’s signs of heat stress such as lack of sweat, tingling or excessively agitated state of mind. Hopefully you won’t reach these negative responses but when you do, it pays to immediately assess your condition and take the safe route. No training or race effort is that important that you should risk your health. Not even the Olympics. And how many of us really get there? Not many. So back off and live to compete another day.
- After a heat stress experience, take time to analyze what conditions or behaviors such as drinking too little fluid, or allowing warm drinks, or wearing the wrong type of clothing, led to heat stress. Often the signs or bad habits were there. You just chose to ignore them.
- Practice taking fluids during runs and rides (especially you cyclists).
- Don’t eat too much before you run or ride on a very hot day. Many cyclists do not react well to eating large amounts of solid food before or during a long ride because the digestive process can pull away blood flow from performance muscles. Every cyclist knows at least one friend who could not resist a hot dog or other good-smelling treat during a century ride, only to find themselves parked on the curb exhausted due to the fight between their stomach digesting the food and their legs crying for blood. Runners and generally cyclists too should not eat a meal within 3 hours of training or competition. This is especially true during hot weather.
- To avoid gastric distress or drops in performance, test your body with performance foods that can be eaten in hot weather conditions and that do not “curdle” (such as milk-based drinks) or cause chemical reactions (especially citrus drinks like orange juice) in your intestinal system that can lead to vomiting or diarrhea. Neither is much fun.
Now that you’ve read some of the scary stuff, you should realize that heat is the enemy to almost all athletes, regardless of training. But here’s an interesting maxim that is wise to remember in planning your training for all seasons.
For runners, heat is worse than cold. But for cyclists, cold is the worst danger.
Why? Because runners can bundle up and continue safely on their way, but you can only take off so much clothing in the heat as a runner before you’re naked, and you’re still not cooling off.
But for cyclists, riding in the heat is somewhat more tolerable because there is an evaporative effect to the breeze created by high-paced riding. But there are limits of course, and most of us have faced them and learned the hard way that cycling in 96 degree heat when the road is kicking up the breath of the devil can bring you to a complete stop in a matter of miles. So there are no hard, fast rules. Get the joke?
However, the worse risk for cyclists does seem to be cold weather. Especially wet, windy and cold weather. Because the same breeze effect that can be a favor in summer can reduce you to a shivering wreck at 20 mph on a 30 degree day. Brrrr. Hypothermia.
So knowing the differences in heat and cold management can literally be a lifesaver.
But not so fast. We mentioned earlier in this article that it sometimes pays to “unlearn” lessons about heat tolerance as well. So what do we mean?
This author once wound up in a hospital following a steeplechase race in a national meet. The weather was 80 degrees, sunny and high humidity. There were no ill effects following the event, but that night fever and chills struck with devastating effect, producing violent vomiting and loss of 7 lbs of body weight on a 140 lb frame. Not good. Every part of the body was tingling and dehydration was a real risk. At the emergency room the next morning the hospital staff did the IV trick and things stabilized, but one really feels like dying during an episode like that.
So for a couple years following that race I had somewhat naturally assumed it was heat stroke that caused all those nasty physical symptoms. In fact I fastidiously avoided racing in the heat because it had taken weeks to recover from that “heat reaction.”
But then a 10 mile road race came along during a period of peak summer fitness in post-collegiate racing. It was early July and temps were rising quickly when the gun went off. Yet despite the high heat and humidity I ran to a 4th place finish against many better runners, clocking a 10-mile time of 53:30. Did I mention it was hot? Yet my kick in the last mile helped overtake two runners that had beaten me in a 10k the week before.
That heat-positive race made me think through the whole “can’t run in the heat scenario.” So I thought back to what might have caused the heat stroke during a 3000M steeplechase and then it came to me: It wasn’t the heat that nearly killed me. It was food poisoning. Our team had gone out to eat after the meet at a pizza chain and something in the pizza was spoiled. Was it stupid not to realize that fact? Maybe so. But we athletes are prone to blame our failures on the first thing that comes to mind. That was the heat, not the pizza. Although cold pizza is pretty good too. But that’s a different subject.
It was however liberating and something of a relief to realize I was not some heat prima donna. Over a long competitive training and racing career there have been other successful races in the heat, not including that 5K in the Prairie State Games where I wound up in a wheelbarrow full of ice. No one’s perfect.
But there have been plenty of other occasions over the years when the heat got to me big time. Just this summer the cumulative effects of the hottest July in 60 years caught me by surprise. I had to drop two group rides in a row, find shelter and ice. And running was difficult too. The pace definitely had to be adjusted a couple times. And that’s putting it mildly.
It all comes down to building a clear perspective on how you respond to heat (and cold). That means knowing your history and paying attention to the present. Then you can adjust and adapt as necessary to survive and even thrive in the heat.
