What I read: All the Tips You Need to Survive Cycling in the Heat (Bicycling) and Heat training can help athletes — and the rest of us — adapt to hotter weather (NPR).
Background: Regular readers know I’m worried about riding bikes in our increasingly hot summers. See Cycling in the heat, can we keep doing it? and Cycling in a climate worsening world: Sam is scared.
I’d love to move my serious riding season to the fall but that can’t happen until I retire. It’s dark very early weekdays in the autumn here and most of the big bike rides I train for are in the summer months.
So I’ve been riding in the heat and trying to get used to it. See here and here.
This weekend we tried the first tip in the article mentioned above–getting acclimated. We rode Saturday and Sunday in heat alert conditions, but we didn’t ride very far (45 km one day and 33 km the next).
It’s also known as heat training. From NPR: “Heat training is not just for competitive athletes. It’s recommended for people in the military and those who work outdoors in hot weather. It could even be useful for generally healthy members of the public, O’Connor says. “People should not be afraid of the heat,” he says. “We can develop and add an adaptive response to help us succeed in the heat. But it’s got to be controlled.” Done right, heat training could help people stay a bit more comfortable in the long, intense stretches of heat marking the extraordinarily hot summer of 2024 and future heat waves expected more frequently due to climate change.”
We also wore lots of sunscreen, and Sarah wore her sunsleeves. I didn’t wear mine, but only because I can’t bear putting them on when I’m already sweaty. That’s tip number 2 from the Bicycling article.
We took it easy and didn’t push it too much.
We also put our water bottles in the freezer so they’d be cool to start and we both took one bottle of water and one bottle of Skratch (rehydration formula with sodium.)
After our rides, we sat in the shade in the backyard and finished our water and Skratch.
In the end, I think we thought our approach was a success. We’re going to keep building distances and sticking to the tips above.
I’ve read that as we age it gets harder and harder to cope with high temperatures. See Study: Older Athletes Struggle More in the Heat, Decreased performance in heat can start as early as age 40.
Here’s our happy selfies on the top row and my sweaty recovering selfies at the end of the ride below.
Although I don’t live in an area that has suffered too much from heat, I have ridden in hot places. Once in Tucson, the leader told us to be sure to drink more that we thought, and to take in plenty of salt. (I keep a bag of salted pistachios with me on longer rides.) That’s mostly desert advice: often riders who are not used to it can suddenly suffer from dangerous loss of fluids and sodium because sweat can dry before you notice it. And the sodium wards off hyponatremia.
When I was leaving to ride the “Southern Tier” (San Diego to St. Augustine), an experienced rider suggested using one of those neck gaiters, dipping it in cool water & wearing it. The breeze you create while riding keeps it cooler than you would expect.
Another practical note for any riding condition, we recently found some amazingly well insulated bottles. They’re called Bivo. I was riding for 3 hours the other day. The weather was warm, not hot. When I checked after 3 hours, the ice I had put in as I left was still rattling around in there. Oh, and they’re metal, not plastic, so environmentally better, and more durable. We went back & got a couple of sizes after trying them out.
Hope your summer riding works out better than expected!
Great suggestions. Thanks!