Heat

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Peak. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

I moved to New York 13 years ago this coming Monday. Since Day One, the feature of the city that’s clashed with my constitution most is not noise or filth or crowds or expense or inconvenience, but summer heat. When I worked in an office, July would come along and I’d dread the two-minute walk to the subway platform, where I’d stand with my shirt already soaking through. At work, my colleagues would layer themselves against the corporate chill of our building—for a while, the home page editors at The New York Times were comparing notes on Snuggies—as I, seemingly alone, savored that arctic relief.

Becoming a triathlete has been a process of changing my relationship to heat.

The hottest part of the day, on a bridge over the Hudson.

Triathlons cluster in the summertime, when it’s most tolerable to start a race of many hours by getting soaked. Further, they are subject to the shape of the day: The marathoner can embark under the aid of a cool morning, but the Ironman hops off the bike and starts his own 26-mile run when the asphalt is already well baked. Endurance races on this scale are trials in heat management and hydration, balancing acts of electrolytes. I didn’t understand this well at first, and at an Olympic-distance triathlon—about 31 miles over, say, two and a half hours—I usually made it through OK.

But that approach hasn’t scaled. I’ve learned that gross motor effort and willpower are both secondary to the maintenance of the body’s energy and signaling and cooling systems. Your foot stays heavy on the gas pedal, yes, but most of your attention has to be on the console before you, its gauges and alarms. By the time there’s a problem, it may already be too late to bring things back within range. Thus none of my long-form workouts unfolds anymore without a map of calories and salt, hour by hour.

It’s a work in progress, though: James was painting the hallway of his house on Sunday when I narrowly managed to get an audio message out from my sweat-soaked watch (it seems no one who designs touchscreens has ever exercised): Could he, pretty please, bring me two liters of ice water for the last 25 minutes of my run? A short while later he passed them through the window of the Bronco, and I shuffled to the two-hour mark in feels-like-93°.

Provided your core temperature doesn’t rise too high, this kind of training is surprisingly beneficial—even more so, by some accounts, than training at high altitude:

Studies have found that, in addition to an increased rate of perspiration, training in the heat can increase an athlete’s blood plasma volume (which leads to better cardiovascular fitness), reduce overall core temperature, reduce blood lactate, increase skeletal muscle force, and, counterintuitively, make a person train better in cold temperatures.

Shuffling along at a snail’s pace on Sunday, I didn’t know about these benefits, and so at first it only worried me that my last training session was proving so difficult. (Lake Placid shouldn’t be nearly as hot on the 21st, but who knows.) What I realized in that ovenish final stretch was that the difficulty was not a warning about the race, but the thing that would clinch my preparation: I’ll be able to do that because I did this, because this is so hard. Heat isn’t my own private misery. It’s a hardship of the athlete, yes, because it makes so plain the limits of human physiology. But those limits, like the psychic ones with which they’re interwoven, aren’t fixed. To run in the heat is to run better.

I’ll be able to do that because I did this.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.