Old-timey medical researchers got a lot wrong. They also got a lot right. And in 1916, Frederic Lee and Ernest Scott started off a paper with the sentence, "It is a fact of common experience that a human being in a hot and humid atmosphere feels a disinclination to perform muscular work." I`m guessing something similar has entered your brain at mile 17 of an Ironman marathon. I`m not exactly discovering general relativity here. Obviously racing in heat and/or humidity slows you down. We all know that. But what is really going on in our bodies, and how do we mitigate its effects on race day? Well now, that`s where things get interesting. When we`re exercising, our bodies produce heat. The warmer our environment gets, alongside a continuous increase in the intensity and/or duration of exercise, the slower we shed heat. Heat accumulates in our bodies and body core temperature continues to rise at a rapid rate. Humid environments are also a problem due to one of our body`s main cooling mechanisms: sweating. The idea is that a little bit of heat from our body is required to turn sweat drops into water vapor, and so that heat leaves our body when our sweat evaporates. This is great in less humid environments where water evaporates more readily. However, in a humid environment where the air is already saturated with water, there`s nowhere for our sweat to evaporate to, so it sticks to our body and doesn`t serve a meaningful cooling function. Your body keeps producing sweat to try to cool itself down, but all it ends up really doing is dehydrating itself. Beyond dehydration, this is a problem because our bodies like operating in a narrow internal core temperature band.
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