Damn...it's hot

Friday, April 02, 2010

It was over 80 degrees when I climbed from my car and slipped into my running gear. It takes most regular exercisers a week to ten days to adjust to heat when temperatures start to get consistently above 80. The first day for me is…well…hell.

The most important job the body performs during exercise in the heat is keeping itself cool. You probably run around 99 degrees normally, but once you start exercising in the heat, you’re body is generating its own heat and, without the whole sweat thing going on, your body temperature would quickly get above 105 degrees, which would cook your brain and you’d die. End of blog.

Fortunately, we’ve got some things built in to keep that from happening. To keep you cool, the blood, which is warming up after passing through the exercising muscles, moves closer to the skin where it has some chance of cooling off. Now…it should be in your legs bringing oxygen there so you can run more efficiently, but no…the body has this thing about not wanting to cook your brain so that’s where it goes. For me, this means running A LOT slower.

My cooling system is somewhat dysfunctional. I’ve suffered from heat related injuries in training and racing over the years and it sucks. I have to build into the heat season slowly and wisely. I tend to do neither well.

So…again…it’s 80 and I’m running. Nothing good can come of this. And nothing does. I put in my first 20 minutes at a slog (slow jog) and I’m having troubles swallowing. You gotta love cotton mouth. Anyway, I’m thinking about the places in the park where they have drinking fountains, but realize it’s only the beginning of April and they probably don’t have them on. Let’s be real…it will probably snow before the end of the week. It is Cleveland, after all.

So I’m coming up to this pristine mountain stream and thinking ‘just wet your lips – it will keep you from gagging like a dog’. I don’t recommend this approach…but my stomach has been conditioned from drinking unpurified water from streams all over the back country while camping for and I’ve built some kind of immunity to those cute, little parasites called giardia lamblia – beaver fever…another day.

Well…I did a little more than wet my lips…but not much. It did keep me from gagging, though. A few minutes further down the trail I saw Jimmy – another runner I coached in high school – coming towards me.

“Hey John – you want to run with me?”

“No thanks. I’d rather puke and die without anyone watching,” I said – no – I just thought it. “Yeah, but I’m moving pretty slow. The heat is really getting to me,” I said.

And slow we went. I was shooting for an hour of running, but by the time we hit 35 minutes, I was toast. My skin was getting tingly and red, I was breathing like I’d run a 4-minute mile and Jimmy was jabbering away nonsensically as he is prone to do. I looked for a rock to batter him, but decided to sit on it, instead.

“You don’t look so good,” he said.

“I don’t feel so good, either.”

So we walked and talked for 10 minutes. I hated finishing like this and suggested we run the last mile. Just before making it to the car, I started dry-heaving…and how I love that! It’s just what I have to do to acclimatize to the heat. There will be a couple more ugly runs and then I’ll start to feel better. Sometimes it takes longer in the Spring…what with a week in the 70’s followed by one in the 40’s. I just have to take it slow, drink large quantities of water when I return and the rest of the day, run in the shade and later in the day and wear lighter and less clothes.

The more out of shape you are, the tougher it is to acclimatize, too. It’s nothing to play around with. Heat and humidity do kill…and every year in this country it happens when it shouldn’t. Road races, summer football, hiking in the mountains and lots of places. Sweating buckets is not the same as losing weight. Be careful. Weigh in before you start and after you finish. The difference is water and should be replaced before the next workout. Trust me on this…I’ve been there.

Almost forgot. Squeezed in a late night walk to East Coast Custard and back, which is about 2.5 miles round trip. Yeah…and I got something there that went…oh…about 500 calories. I figured if I ate it on the walk home then turned around and walked back to the store to throw away the container, I’d burn off all I’d eaten. Would have worked, too, but I ate it there and threw away the container before going home. Good plan. Poor execution.

Run duration: 41 minutes. Walk duration: 40 minutes.

Training Heart Rate: 140 running. 65 walking.

Calories burned during workout: 700 running. 240 walking.