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HEAT ADJUSTMENT FOR SUMMER RACES
Have you noticed that people from areas with hotter weather wilt less in hot weather races than do athletes from the cool, foggy San Francisco area? This is not simply because they are "used to it" in an emotional sense. The are a collection of physiological changes that occur when you live and train in hotter compared to colder areas.
Two of the things that change are:
- INCREASED BLOOD PLASMA VOLUME: Your body actually resets the amount of water that it will store in your blood. This means that you can sweat longer before you become dehydrated enough to slow down. It also means that you have enough blood volume to supply your muscles for work, your skin for cooling and your gut for digesting on a hot day, where a cold weather athlete has to choose one or two of the three on a hot day. That's part of why one loses one's appetite and has a hard time eating solid food on hot days if one has mostly lived and trained in cold.
- MORE AND BETTER SWEAT GLANDS: In heat trained individuals more sweat glands become active, allowing you to cool over more of your body surface. Less sweat per gland also means less dripping, so less water that could be used for evaporative cooling is wasted as run-off. Less heat-adjusted individuals sweat from the hairline, armpits and groin heavily, and less from the rest of the body. Better trained individuals sweat more evenly all over.
Notice that neither of these things hurts your performance on a cool day, but together they can allow you to survive and compete on a hot day where their absence leaves you in the medical tent with a heat stroke, or at least forces you to slow down so as to generate less heat.
What does this have to do with you? It turns out that you don't have to live in a hot area to get a heat adjustment. All you have to do is convince your body that it lives in a hot area. You can do that by continuously overdressing. This is one of the reasons that you'll see elite athletes wearing warm caps even on days that are not particularly cold. (Another reason might be that with their minimal body fat they lack insulation for even mildly cool days).
Each person responds to heat in his or her own way, but it typically takes a month or two to fully adjust. This is important right now because we are two months out from the first hot races of the year. If [you] attend hot summer races, you'll do much better if you've done your heat adjustment training starting in the next few weeks. To get a heat adjustment going you don't need to spend hours in the Sauna. Rather you need to dress warmly enough all the time to keep up very light sweating. Note that I say "all the time" and not just while training. You want to be just a little uncomfortably warm. That will do the job. The sauna may help with the emotional adjustment to heat. If you use the sauna be very careful to stay hydrated.
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