Running Hot

Hot one in Perth today, currently sitting about 36 degrees. That is hot by most measures. Well okay, my brother lives in a town called Mount Isa and by their standards 36 is a lovely spring day, but for  the rest of us, it is hot.

36 degrees is definitely warm enough that the heat needs to be taken into account when doing exercise.

I have a couple of exercise related activities on this afternoon and I will be thinking about the heat for both of them.

Activity 1 will be myself going for a run. Given the current heat I will probably look to hold off on that until 5:00ish, hopefully things will have cooled down a bit by then. But all the same, I think I will be running a bit slower and a bit shorter today. I am not running for any particular goal, so I have the flexibility of taking it a bit easy and so I think I will be cutting myself some slack.

Activity 2 is going to be coaching a run session and that is one where I think I will need to be a bit more careful. The coached session is later in the day, so hopefully it will be a little cooler by then, but that is no guarantee in a Perth Summer. Even if it is a bit cooler, those guys will be attempting to run pretty hard and so they will need to be mindful of the heat. For those folks I will be ensuring they take the heat into account in their pacing and making sure they have some water available. I have no doubt that they will be fine, but it doesn't hurt to be a bit conservative.

The potential impacts of heat and dehydration when exercising should not be underestimated. Obviously in the extreme cases it can cause death, but even without going to that rather extreme end of the scale, there is still a lot of potential for doing harm and feeling generally horrible. Heat stress can really knock you around, and even just overheating and getting dehydrated can knock you out of the park with respect to training the next day.

The human body is pretty good at cooling, but it also doesn't cope well with overheating, the line between hot and overheating is not a very big one. For the sake of health and sustainable training it isn't worth being a hero on a hot day. Be a bit conservative on pacing, don't try and train in the heat of the day, perhaps cut a session short if you have too, take some precautions so that you can keep your body cool and make sure you have plenty of fluids available. Training on a hot day is entirely doable, it just pays to be a little bit careful about it.