Emily and I live in San Antonio, Texas. Em has lived here her whole life, and I am essentially a local at this point, having lived here for the last seven years. Even before I became a full time San Antonian, I was a resident of Clear Lake, Texas, where the heat and humidity will bake you from the inside out. Given all of this, I consider myself something of an expert in training in hot summer weather. Or if not an expert, at least an experienced amateur. It is sometimes said that training in hot, humid conditions is similar to training at altitude, and offers similar benefits. This is a dirty, dirty lie.
Training in Texas in the summer sucks. It sucks big time. Pretending otherwise is either wishful thinking or the beginnings of outright delusion. I tend to look at two things when evaluating just how shitty it is outside: temperature and dew point. Temperature we all know and understand, and dew point is a measure of the amount of moisture in the air; the temperature at which the air can no longer hold additional moisture, thus forming dew. What I consider the usual for San Antonio is a temperature of 70-75 degrees in the morning, rising to 95-100, with a dew point of about 70-75 degrees. Today for example, we had a low of 78, a high of 103, and a dew point of 72 degrees. The general consensus is that dew points of over 65 is pretty gross, and over 70 is downright miserable.
Elite track and field athletes live in places like Portland, Oregon, where today the temperature started at 54 degrees, and rose to a whopping 64 degrees. And in case you were wondering, the dew point was 54 degrees, firmly within the “wow this feels terrific” range. I say more power to them, but if us Joe Schmos are to keep up, we need to have a well planned strategy for dealing with the conditions facing us.
- Drink water. Lots of water. More water than you previously could have imagined yourself drinking. When I do my morning 10 miler, I tend to lose about 4 pounds of water weight. Not to get gross or anything, but it sometimes takes until about 3pm before my pee finally gets back to being clear. If I didn't drink water continuously throughout the day, I probably wouldn't even make it to the 2nd run.
- Understand that workouts will be slower. For someone like me, this trends to about 10 seconds per mile slower. For others (like Emily when her asthma is acting up) it can be closer to 30 seconds per mile. It doesn't really matter; the fact that running in bad conditions sucks doesn't mean anything about how you'll do in good conditions 3-4 months from now. But if you try to force yourself to hit some predetermined idea of “tempo” pace, you might end up digging a nice, deep hole to fall into.
- Get the bulk of your running done in the morning. It seems obvious, but damned if people don't still have trouble sucking it up and waking up early. I've been doing 9-10 miles in the morning, with 4-6 miles after work. I probably wouldn't live if I reversed those mileage amounts. Get up while it's dark and (relatively) cool, and get most or all of your running done. Or pay the price.
That's about it. Take it for what it's worth, but as someone who's done 100-115 miles a week in South Texas for more than one summer, I feel like I'm at least a somewhat credible source. How you train during the summer has a profound effect on what results you get in the fall, so it's all too important that us Southern folk overcome adversity and train like champs. If there are weaknesses in how I train from June to August, it will be way too late to compensate for them from September to October. So here's to ignoring the heat and getting it done, and making Quenton Cassidy proud.
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