How to train for spring/summer hot-weather races during the winter
Adapting to races in difficult conditions—from high altitude to hot weather—are some of sport’s most interesting challenges. You’ve heard about high-altitude and warm-weather training, but outside of the realm of professional athletes, how much of it is relevant for you?
Well, actually, quite a lot.
Today we’re going to focus specifically on how to train for spring/summer hot-weather races during the winter, when outside it’s twelve degrees and daffodils and bluebells are nothing more than glints in mother nature’s eye.
But why is training for hot weather in cold weather important?
Imagine training through winter and the start of spring, when temperatures are still low, yet experiencing a sudden hot snap just in time for race day. Plenty of marathons take place during this risky transition between the seasons—Madrid, London to name two of them. What’s more, spring marathons are only becoming warmer.
Without any heat preparation, you’ll underperform during the race, potentially by a significant amount.
So how do you get around this?
The short answer is pretty logical. If your environment is cold, you need to recreate the hot conditions during your training.
We’ll give you some options below.
And we’ve broken the long answer down into a handy list of tips and interesting things to consider.
Anticipate Early
Your body is able to adapt to hot conditions in 10-14 days, but it’s a good idea to get this preparation in early. It’s never wise to make big changes to your training at the last minute—especially if you’re training for a marathon and are simultaneously increasing the distance of your long runs.
Our recommendation is to do at least one of the following a month or two before a race:
Incorporating saunas into your routine. Here, you don’t even have to be exercising. The key thing is that you’re sweating. 30 minutes of exposure each session is fine. The longer you sit in a sauna the bigger the training effect, but much more than 30 minutes comes with the risk of dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Going on holiday to a hot climate. Unfortunately just sitting in an air-conditioned room isn’t going to cut it. Just as with any of the three options, you have to build up a sweat for the training to be effective. You don’t need to be exercising heavily, or even walking, as long as your body temperature is producing the desired effect.
Wearing more clothes while training. You can achieve the same benefits as the first two options just by putting on an extra layer (like another jacket and a hat).
Focus on the positives—the science behind training for hot-weather races
Hot-weather training might be a challenge, but there is a fascinating cascade of positive physical adaptations to keep you motivated. One thing triggers the next.
Your blood volume increases, so you have more blood delivering oxygen to the working muscles, more blood to sweat with, more blood to digest with. Put another way, the fuel your body is running on becomes more abundant.
Your red blood count increases. The quality of your blood’s ability to do its job improves, so on top of the increase in volume you also have more oxygen carrying capacity. You can deliver more oxygen with the same amount of blood.
You sweat better. When you go to the gym your muscles get stronger, and when you train in hot conditions, your sweat glands become bigger, stronger, and more efficient. Strong sweat glands make for less salty sweat, which in turn allows for the damaging effects of dehydration to be mitigated.
You sweat more and earlier. As your body temperature rises you begin to sweat at a certain temperature—a ‘sweat threshold’. This threshold is triggered at a lower temperature for heat-adapted athletes, meaning they start to sweat earlier and defend their body temperature better (and therefore perform better) than non heat-adapted athletes.
Get real, and work with the changing climate
We’re getting more common warm spells at the end of April, so this is a problem that might well become more and more prevalent over time.
It’s easy to underestimate this challenge, or to dismiss it as too much effort, but we have a little Kaizen story that might illustrate the benefits of taking warm-weather race training seriously.
Here’s the story.
Back in 2018, Kaizen founder Josh began the London marathon—which at 24.1C/75.3F turned out to be the hottest on record. Organisers handed out 4.5 litres of water per person, a global record for mass-participation events.
Josh, though, had been training for the heat by wearing several extra layers. Out of over 40,000 amateur runners, Josh finished 46th, his best result ever relative to the rest of the field. But most impressively, and to illustrate the main point of this blog, Josh was overtaken by just two people in the second half of the race.
So while everyone around him was suffering and poorly adapted to the heat, Josh felt relatively more comfortable. The race was still a challenge—he was still susceptible to the heat, but less-so than other people.
In fact, he also overtook seventy eight runners, propelling him to that impressive finish position.
The unadapted runners he was competing with hit the wall sooner and harder.
Marathons are tough. The moral here is to not let a sudden change in the weather make them even tougher, and ruin all your hard work.
Final point: be wary of de-training
Timing is everything. It’s great if you’re able to include hot-weather training into your race preparation, but be cautious that you de-train at a similar, though slightly slower, pace to your initial adaptation period.
So if you take two weeks to get up to speed and you stop, you’ll have lost your heat-training gains in about the same amount of time. Really one of the training options—saunas, wearing extra clothes, or having that enjoyable holiday in the Canary Islands—needs to continue to the start of the taper period.
And that’s it for warm-weather training during the winter. Have you ever suffered while running in the heat?
We know we have. Our Madrid Kaizen contingent has been suffering this very week—not just with the training, but with February sunburn too.
As Baz Luhrmann advised in the world’s oddest hit song from the 90s, when the sun is out, wear sunscreen too.
If you have any more questions, you can chat to us on our Discord and Strava.
And don’t miss out on trying out the Kaizen running app with a free month-long trial.
