Wow. If you are on the east coast like we are, we don’t have to tell anyone that its been H.O.T.

If you don’t agree with me, let’s look at it from your body’s perspective. When you exercise, you ask your body to metabolize fuel stores, regulate energy balance, and produce mechanical work so that you can move from point A to point B. All this effort produces heat. Your body has a lot of internal mechanisms to regulate body temperature, and they work pretty well. But your body has limits as to how rapidly it can cool itself off. Did you know that your body actually begins to compromise its ability to perform at around 72 degrees? Now think about how much challenge a 95 degrees environment places on that body.

Still not convinced? Let’s say that your typical Wednesday morning track work out is 12x 90 second 400 repeats, with 45 seconds between each. Think about how much stress that places on the body under normal conditions. Now let’s consider our weather reality. Its now 10-15 degrees hotter than usual and more humid. Trying to run that same workout under these conditions is significantly more stressful than typical. You may notice that you can’t make the 90 second split without taking more rest between reps. You may even notice that under these conditions, 90 seconds is not even possible. Let’s say that your triathlon training schedule has you doing a 5 hr ride on Sunday AM. However, the heat has slowed your pace down significantly after 2.5 hrs, and all you want to do is jump off the bike into a cool pool. Its OK to back off the workload to match the change in conditions – you’ll STILL GET THE BENEFIT OF THE WORKOUT. Shorten the ride. Increase your rest. Take longer breaks between intervals. Do whatever it takes to be consistent with your training, but realize that extreme weather requires some modifications to ensure we aren’t just pounding ourselves into the ground. Remember- you’re body doesn’t really know exactly how fast its going or how long a rest you are taking; it just knows that you are pushing it harder than you have in the past and with all this heat, it just might push back.