In this episode, I talk about a couple of articles I saw recently about running in the heat—about heat acclimation and endurance training—that honestly kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

So alert runners: we need to have a talk about this. I start by reading an excerpt from one of these popular running websites and unpacking some of the flawed assumptions behind this kind of messaging.

You’ll hear me break down why the obsession with suffering—grinding through extreme conditions, chasing bigger mileage, and pushing your body to the limit—has become so normalized in endurance culture, and how that mindset can quietly lead to overtraining, burnout, and hormone dysfunction.

I also share a more sensible approach to building heat tolerance and aerobic fitness that honors health, balance, and long-term consistency.

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad talks about some of the “running in heat” articles he has read, and points out some disagreements he has with those articles. [01:06]

The compelling argument that for the vast majority of recreational runners, running is a very bad idea. [04:00]

The popular modality of high intensity interval training, by and large is conducted in an ill-advised manner in workouts that last too long and are significantly too stressful for the vast majority of participants. [06:05]

If you stop sweating, you know you are close to heat stroke. [15:19]

There’s no justification to go out there and stick it to yourself in heat preparation. [22:09]

Even though Brad is talking about the danger of racing in the heat, he understands the need to do it. [24:03]

If you’re running in the heat, but you’re totally oblivious to how hot you’re getting, that can be a recipe for disaster. [33:35]

Some of the world’s best runners do not workout at top speed. [36:50]

If you insist on performing the workout in a fatigue state, you are literally training your body to run slower because the central nervous system is protecting you. [45:57]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• BradNutrition.com
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• Brad’s Shopping Page
• BornToWalkBook.com
• B.rad Podcast – All Episodes
• Peluva Five-Toe Minimalist Shoes
• Primal Blueprint Fitness Pyramid
• Podcast with Hutchinson
• Podcast with Shelby Houlihan
• Shelby Houlihan Workout Wednesday
• Jay Feldman.com

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast – where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life. I’m Brad Kearns, NY Times bestselling author, world #1 ranked masters age 60-plus high jumper, and former #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. You’ll learn how to stay fit, strong and powerful as you age; transform your diet to lose body fat and increase energy; sort through hype and misinformation to make simple, sustainable lifestyle changes; and broaden your perspective beyond a fit body to experience healthy relationships, nonstop personal growth, and ultimately a happy, healthy, long life. Let’s explore beyond shortcuts, hacks, and crushing competition to laugh, have fun, appreciate the journey, and not take ourselves too seriously. It’s time to B.rad!

Brad (00:51):
I’m melting off a lot in the show because I get to, because I’ve been there and done that and put my body through extreme heat stress so many times and glad to be here to tell you about it. But

Brad (01:06):
I saw a couple articles recently about running in the heat acclimating, to the heat for endurance training, and the articles kind of rubbed me wrong. So alert runners, I’m sorry, but we have to have a talk about this. I wanna start with this actual excerpt from an article on a popular running website. The Complete Runner’s Guide to Running and Racing in the Heat by Noted Coach. Excellent information in here and guidance for how to run and race in the heat. That’s not what bothered me. We have all these tips. You’re looking at your urine color, what, what beverages to drink, a heat index chart. And there’s even a pace calculation formula where you can determine that if you run seven-minute miles in cool weather, you’re gonna have to adjust to 7:45 per the conditions on the heat index. We have important symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. All of this good stuff for those interested and insisting on doing endurance races and training in the heat. And I know that’s a lot of people because in the summer months, many of the large population centers across the North American continent and elsewhere are pretty warm, even at the optimal parts of the day. I just got back from Phoenix, Arizona, <laugh>, and was amused to land and discover 113 degree temperatures.

Brad (02:45):
I could not imagine exercising outdoors. We’re gonna cover that theme extensively in this show. But I was also amused when I went to bed and texted my wife at 10:10 PM I took a screenshot and the temperature was still 96 degrees. So there’s basically no good options if you want to go for an endurance exercise in that kind of extreme heat. A lot of people are dealing with high humidity and lower absolute temperatures, but on that heat index chart, which is easy to find on the internet, you can navigate to what the quote feels-like-temperature is based on humidity as well as actual degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. Here’s the excerpt that really, set me off, and this is about a heat acclimation program to help runners get their bodies ready for efforts in hot weather. Quote, the bedrock of the program is a 30 minute run in 100 degree heat, followed by a 104 degree hot tub soak to extend thermal stress without trashing the legs.

Brad (04:00):
One key discovery was the author’s personal blind spot, even as his core temperature climbed above 100, he rated his perceived warmth as three out of 10 for quite a while. In other words, he didn’t realize how hot he really was getting, he claimed to still feel comfortable. A crucial part of heat training is learning to recalibrate your internal thermostat to accurately judge how hot you truly are because your body might be cooking long before you feel it end quote. And it’s shit like this that compelled Mark Sisson and I to write the book, born to Walk, where we have a thorough investigation of the hype and folly and the unintended consequences of the running boom and advance. The compelling argument that for the vast majority of recreational runners running is a very bad idea. It can easily compromise your general health, your longevity, increase your overall life.

Brad (04:58):
Stress levels almost certainly promote overuse injury according to the widely distributed stats on the regularity of overuse injury among the running population, and certainly not contribute to the reduction of excess body fat, which could be one of the preeminent goals among people who are out there putting in miles. Not only that, it can drive very possibly drive the accumulation of health, destructive, visceral fat. Furthermore, all that energy expenditure toward your weekly mileage goals can inhibit you from doing the workouts that offer by far the best return on investment for human total body functional fitness and longevity reference back to the Primal Blueprint Fitness Pyramid where we have extensive everyday movement. Of course, the centerpiece of that would be walking and other general ways to move the body. We could include formal exercise programs like yoga, Pilates, even foam rolling and things like that count toward your movement objective.

Brad (06:05):
But we’ll think about walking and comfortably paced aerobic endurance exercise, which many people flunk on that metric when applied to their mileage, that they’re out there shuffling and huffing and puffing outside of the aerobic zone and into the over, over more stressful glucose burning zones. So number one, increase all forms of general everyday movement. And then of course we have the strength training regular efforts where you put your body under resistance load and then brief explosive all-out sprints. We also added in primal blueprint fitness, the recommendation to play and have unstructured outdoor, fun physical activity to bust loose from the confines of modern life. There is no justification or rationale for steady state cardiovascular exercise at medium to difficult heart rates. Whew. However, this seems to be one of the most popular aspects of the mainstream fitness movement with the other really popular modality being high intensity interval training, which by and large is conducted in an ill-advised manner in workouts that last too long and are slightly too significantly too stressful for the vast majority of participants.

Brad (07:26):
I use the example frequently of a CrossFit workout, which has a great philosophy of building broad-based fitness skills, but generally speaking, and also looking at the extremely high injury rate among regular CrossFit enthusiasts, the workouts are lasting too long with too much stress and conducted too many times over the course of the week by the people who get deep into the CrossFit scene and go there for the wonderful social experience. But in my experience and many other experts, the workouts are quite difficult and especially when they demand complex intricate athletic movements when the body is already fatigued. So when you’re doing Olympic lifts at minute number 38 in a very difficult session where you’ve already climbed the rope, you’ve already run around the block, you’ve already done some of this and that you’re huffing and puffing, your brain’s getting a little tired, and now you have to execute a very difficult and challenging exercise that brings an extremely high risk of injury.

Brad (08:27):
And in the case of the shuffling masses in the running boom, what’s happening is you are just adding to the pile of chronic stress that already exists in most of our hectic daily lives. So brief, explosive sprint workouts, brief, high intensity strength training sessions that can last between 10 and 30 minutes. The sprint workouts, as I’ve talked about often, the hard efforts only last for a sum total of a couple few minutes. Of course, there’s a warmup, there’s dynamic stretching, there’s drills that are, uh, slightly too significantly stressful or difficult, but these are things that last 10 or 20 seconds maximum I’ve always talked about the maximum duration for a sprint should be 20 seconds after that, it goes into the realm of high intensity interval training. So a sprint workout is brief, explosive efforts with extensive rest and recovery afterward. These are workouts that you can even do in hot temperatures without bringing this huge aspect of thermal stress to the body on top of a workout that’s already stressful.

Brad (09:33):
So this breezy article that me off so much that I was forced to turn on the microphone, the bedrock of the program is a 30 minute run in a hundred degree heat. Are you effing kidding me? To recommend that and publish that on a website, a respected website, that’s a tough one for me to swallow. Now, if you’re addressing the elite athlete, and that’s exactly what Alex Hutchinson did when he wrote another article talking about his visit to the performance center in Eugene, Oregon. Here’s the title of it, heat Training Like A Pro Is Hell. Here’s what I learned. Alex reports on spending the day at the Exercise and Environmental Physiology lab at the University of Oregon where he tried the heat adaptation protocol used by some of the best runners in the world. Please absorb that subhead as you breathily learn about Alex’s experience where he followed the protocol that we mentioned, a 30 minute run in extremely hot temperatures.

Brad (10:30):
He was doing it on a treadmill in a heat environment. And then drifting into the 104 degree hot tub there after his run to further stimulate thermal training without trashing the legs as the breezy quote that I recited mentioned. Uh, he does not look very happy there. And indeed, he reports in detail how tough the the whole experience was. And some of the alarming takeaways as I read in the quote, the author that’s Alex in this case, discovered a blind spot even as his core temperature climbed above. It went up to 103 during his run and also 103 in the hot tub, but he was rating three outta 10 while running on the treadmill with his internal body temperature 103. And indeed, I’ve experienced this too, where there’s a bit of a delay where you feel fine and you’re still out there going, and then you pay the price severely later.

Brad (11:30):
I remember getting heat exhaustion, that’s the step below heat stroke where you have to be hospitalized and your body temperature climbs to dangerous. But heat exhaustion is no fun. And I once got it coaching a youth soccer tournament, amazingly by the beach in Santa Cruz, California, where they had the all time record temperature ever measured in Santa Cruz. This is a northern California beach town. It was 103 degrees on the pier on the ocean on that particular day in, uh, was it about 2012, I believe. And I was out there on the fields for many hours. And then that night I had to lay down. I was down for about 11 hours and putting bags of ice on my chest, on my neck for hours and hours until I was finally able to fall asleep. I just felt horrible the whole next day, and I wasn’t even doing anything except offering gentle encouragement to the players.

Brad (12:23):
So that was one bout of heat exhaustion. Uh, I’ve had, uh, numerous others, especially in my racing days, but also I remember another time where I did two really challenging high jump and sprinting workouts in hot temperatures in the summer over a hundred each time. And I believe what happened is because there were only one day apart on the second one, let’s say it was Wednesday and Friday, uh, after the Friday workout, I got myself into big trouble. I felt terrible, even though I felt fine during the workout. I might have given a perceived heat rating of three out of 10 like Alex Hutchinson. But later that weekend, I ended up in the emergency room with a very serious medical condition, which was a ruptured appendix. They put several bags of IV solution into me, so I was extremely dehydrated.

Brad (13:19):
I asked the medical experts if that was a contributing factor to one of my organs blowing up and burning out, and they said, no, but I have a suspicion that doing those two workouts did not help my cause when I presented at the hospital with an organ that needed to be removed from my body. So that delayed effect where the highly motivated and uh, competitive brain is out there performing, uh, even though you’re getting hot and going up to 103 during the run is about as high as you want to go until you get in big, big trouble. But Alex, a very, very experienced former elite runner and the preeminent sports science journalists in the world, uh, arguably with his wonderful series in Outside magazine and his string of excellent books, boy, if that can fool him, essentially, that’s pretty scary for the average person.

Brad (14:12):
It’s so scary that I would certainly never sign my name or publish an article saying the bedrock of the program is a 30 minute run in a hundred degree Fahrenheit, followed by a fricking 104 degree hot tub soak. They didn’t say how many minutes Alex had to spend in the hot tub. But whew, if you can survive a 30 minute run in 100 degree heat, the last thing I’d wanna do or recommend is to go jump in a hot tub. In fact, my hot tub is turned off. It’s on, sleep mode for the entire summer here when it gets so warm that it’s never appealing to go sit in a hot tub after a day where the temperatures, uh, gotten up to a hundred degrees. So it’s this kind of stuff that compelled Mark Sisson and I to write, Born to Walk, and to try to get you to rethink and reconsider this devotion to doing stupid shit like insisting on endurance training and racing when the temperatures are unfavorable.

Brad (15:19):
Again, if you’re going for the Olympics, yes indeed, you better go to heat training camp and altitude training camp, and whatever’s in store with your coaching and your protocols to help the body prepare and train for difficult efforts, maximum efforts when it’s really hot. And notably, these excellent articles with a lot of scientific reference, I showed you the one first time called a Complete Runner’s Guide to Running and Racing in the Heat, and then Alex’s piece on his visit to the Eugene Oregon Heat Laboratory, you learn a lot about how the body works, and one of the insights pulled away is that takes around 10 to 14 days to acclimate. And what happens as you continue to train and expose your body to heat during sustained exercise, you end up starting to sweat earlier and more volume and your sweat is more dilute.

Brad (16:18):
So you preserve electrolytes that you need in the heat, but the more you sweat, of course, the evaporative cooling effect allows you to feel cooler because you’re sweating. Many people know that one of the signs that you’re in real trouble with heat exhaustion heading toward heat stroke is when you stop sweating. So when you stop that evaporative cooling, that means your body is cooking from the inside and you’re in big trouble, and you sure better get to cooler temperatures and stop exercising, or you’re gonna be in the hospital. So you learn to sweat earlier, sweat more voluminously, you sweat in a more dilute manner. What happens there is it increases your plasma volume. So you are basically ready or priming your system to operate in the heat with less stress thanks to the acclimation factor. Apparently, as it mentioned in the article, your brain also develops a perceived exertion where pretty soon you get used to the heat.

Brad (17:20):
So it doesn’t seem as bad, of course, as your first day when you landed on the airplane. I remember landing for the Ironman in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, and the airport is right there on the lava fields, and you step out of that airplane and you’re like, holy crap, I cannot believe I’m gonna have to race 140 mile swim 2.4, bike one 12 and run 26.2 in these temperatures that feel like you’re getting blasted by a blow torch as soon as you step out into the open air breezy airport. Whew. Yeah, that’s a psych out for people traveling from all over the world for the biggest triathlon. I’ve talked about this a lot before, where it just is absolutely idiotic to contest, uh, such an extreme and prolonged event and bring all these amateur recreational participants in to an extremely inhospitable and arguably dangerous environment when you’re having people pedal and run on the lava fields.

Brad (18:21):
It’s just, uh, nonsense, but it’s, uh, sport tradition. And so the Hawaii Ironman in particular has been glorified as the ultimate accomplishment in the sport of triathlon. Of course, you have to qualify in it’s very stringent qualifying standards from other Ironman or half Ironman races around the world. So you do have the cream of the crop showing up in Hawaii, unlike some other events where there’s one in the fall in Arizona, and I believe anyone can enter there’s Ironmans in cities all over the world without that rigid qualifying standards. And that’s also a place where you get people who are poorly prepared and heading out there to suffer. But boy, there’s nothing like suffering in the heat because it’s so dangerous. So that’s why I am doing this show kind of to get you to second guess the entire big picture rationale of whether you should want to participate in a heat-related competition, which would be the only rationale for insisting upon training in hot conditions to drive those adaptations.

Brad (19:27):
It’s all a matter of stress and rest balance in life. So if you’re out there exercising and doing something that’s already difficult, especially when most endurance runners are running at a pace that is slightly too significantly too stressful and is above the fat burning zone into the higher stress zones, and you insist on doing it in the heat in the name of preparing for some upcoming race that’s gonna happen in the heat, let’s back up a whole bunch of steps and ask ourselves why. And if there are better ways to better things that you can devote your competitive intensity and your fitness budget to. I talked about how sprinting is so short in duration that even in hot conditions, it’s not going to torch your body like that 30 minute run in a hundred degree Fahrenheit, followed by the soak in the hot tub.

Brad (20:19):
You’re, you’re gonna get out there, you’re gonna get super warm, but you’re gonna be done with everything before you have this drifting up out of the safe zones and into the 103 plus body temperature. I remember last summer in Sacramento, California was the USA track and Field Masters National Championships coinciding with a huge heat wave that was by far the hottest week of the entire year in Sacramento. I felt so bad and apologetic to all the people that have traveled from all over the country to my area of the country. I’m sorry it was so hot for you at the meet, but everyone sucked it up, including the volunteers. I was so impressed. And I competed in the 400 meters final event for the men’s 55 to 59 division at 4:00 PM on Thursday, July 17th, I believe it was, which was the hottest day, and it was 109 that day.

Brad (21:15):
And 4:00 PM is about the hottest time of the day when you’re looking at a typical summer pattern. And I remember doing the high jump at 8:30 AM under relatively more pleasant conditions. I went home, I was hanging out in the air conditioning all day, and I was seriously thinking my legs were a little sore and tired from the high jump, and I’m like, why don’t I just bail on this thing? <laugh> We do know that it’s 109 out there, uh, but it what got me out of bed and driving over to the nearby track was first that the nationals were right here in my backyard. So it was pretty easy to justify making the effort. And second, I was thinking about all the volunteers who were out there all day helping the athletes deal with the extreme heat. And amazingly enough, the experience wasn’t that bad because I was only giving maximum effort for one minute.

Brad (22:09):
Well, a little over one minute, the winner was well under one minute, but I think you get my point. Warming up was super easy. You didn’t have to do much, and you were already hot and had all the parameters indicating that you were ready to deliver a peak performance effort. The thing we’re trying to do when we have cold or rainy temperatures, we really gotta work hard to warm up the muscles, the joints, the body piece of cake when it’s 109 out there. And as soon as I was done, boy, there goes the cold water, the cold towels, the shade, and getting the heck outta there and trying to get back into air conditioning as fast as possible. So I’m not saying it was an easy deal to go and compete in a track, meet with those temperatures, but vastly less stressful and damaging to the body, then being out there and shuffling along for let’s say a half marathon or a marathon or an Ironman triathlon in extremely hot conditions.

Brad (23:06):
And again, I’m saying this because all of us have to deal with extreme heat over the hot summer months, wherever we are, almost all of us, right? Not if we’re on the Oregon coast, like where my mother grew up, where the high the highest day of this summer is probably 70, 65 to 70 and sunny most days completely temperate. Uh, and you know, that’s a, a small segment of the population. Most people are in hot steamy conditions across the main continent, and even in the most comfortable temperature areas, it gets a little tough out there in the summer to to manage going early morning, going late at night. Those are good strategies. And again, there’s no justification to go out there and stick it to yourself in heat preparation. Why not just reconsider these races that are held in the heat and go for something more sensible is one message I would propose here, unless you’re really, really serious.

Brad (24:03):
Hey, I’m a really, really serious track and field athlete and I wanna participate in the national championships, so I was gonna suck it up for that 109 degree race, but there was no way I would put my body through that if I was running the 5,000 or something out there where you really are in danger of getting into the heat exhaustion, heat stroke, uh, condition. And I had a couple really hot races on the professional triathlon circuit. One of ’em was in St. Thomas Virgin Islands in 1993. And I remember running on the run course and feeling dizzy and seeing double and seeing the, uh, emanation of the heat, uh, coming off the pavement. And I realized that I was in very bad shape, uh, barely finished the thing, and it took me a long time to recover and feel better. So I had really done something brutal to my body in the name of being a competitor on the professional triathlon circuit, and they put up a race with prize money in St. Thomas.

Brad (24:58):
We all fly there. But when I think back, uh, about how ridiculous it was to put the body through that kind of hell, especially as it relates to the most respectable and honorable pursuit of peak performance, I think you need good conditions. And we can watch the Olympians and the people that deal with and endure those crazy conditions, but for most recreational people, it’s sort of not worth it, <laugh>. Anyway, if you disagree with me, that’s fine, I’d love to hear from you. podcast@bradventures.com is the email address. And I know we get that sort of bucket list satisfaction, that expanding your comfort zone satisfaction from persevering and doing something difficult. And I definitely felt that way after I contested that 400 meters. I realized after I said, you know what, if I did this today, that means I can race in any conditions. <laugh> 109, even with low humidity, I think is pretty high on the, the heat index scale shown earlier.

Brad (26:00):
Let’s check a bit, shall we? Temperature 110. Yeah, we’re in the yellow and the orange very quickly, even with 10 or 20% humidity. So it was a source of pride and satisfaction that I did get outta bed and go over there and compete, but again, I wasn’t putting myself in the same grave danger or extreme stress pattern as someone who’s exercising there in something that’s more prolonged or someone who’s engaged in a training pattern, for example, all summer, preparing for the marathon that’s gonna be hot as well, and going out there and insisting on running day after day. Even in this article they were talking about how they used the term pick your poison at the beginning, meaning that if you exercise in the morning, it’s less humidity, lower temperature, but higher humidity. And then if you wait till the evening, it’s lower humidity, higher temperature.

Brad (27:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I mean how about taking those months of the summer when it’s really, really bad, and those days when it’s really, really bad and choosing an alternative exercise like pedaling a stationary bike inside an air conditioned gym. Don’t worry, you’re not gonna lose your badass club membership if you just be sensible and back off. And I’m mouthing off a lot in this show because I get to, because I’ve been there and done that and put my body through extreme heat stress so many times, and glad to be here to tell you about it. But I think I’ve relayed this on a previous show. When I was in Kailua-Kona two years ago, I had sort of a P-T-S-D reaction to the reflections on the craziness of racing the Ironman in those conditions. And we were shopping at the farmer’s market downtown, probably a block from the finish line and the historic birthplace of the modern triathlon.

Brad (27:57):
And I was looking at my papayas and my pineapples and mangoes, and then, uh, all of a sudden the clouds broke. It was an overcast day. And boom, as soon as those clouds break in Hawaii, you are getting intense sun beating down on you onto the blacktop, which is the hottest surface you could imagine for sun reflection. That’s why the lava fields and the Queen K highway is so brutal for the athletes and for everyone else, right? And I remember just kind of feeling a little spacey and overheated, and I had to go over and sit down in the shade on the curb after my aggressive shopping tour. And I sat down on the shade, and I looked at my watch, and I realized this was about the time that we would rack our bikes, put on our shoes, and head out for a fricking 26.2 mile marathon in the most intense and draining heat you could imagine.

Brad (28:50):
And I actually did have a visceral reaction, like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking? And I felt so bad, and sorry for the young Brad Kearns, who somehow with that competitive intensity and that drive to compete and excel, push my body to do something that ridiculous. Anyway, that’s my share. I want to give a little more details about, Alex Hutchinson’s study. And remember, this is my two-time former podcast guest. The most recent show we had was having a, it was gonna be a friendly debate, and it really turned into a friendly agreement on the potentially contentious topic that we advance in Born to Walk. That running’s not a great idea for most people. And Alex said, you know, running is a great endeavor for people who can recover from their workouts. So he says, as long as you’re recovering from your workouts, that’s great.

Brad (29:46):
Thumbs up to running. And I said, absolutely. That’s all we’re talking about here. Also, Mark and I in the book, is doing it correctly and not trashing yourself and not plunging into becoming one of those statistics of overuse injury or someone who’s struggling with excess body fat because the running is too stressful and you’re adding belly fat and stripping down lean muscle tissue. All these reactions to an overly stressful program. So we had a beautiful show, friendly agreement, and realizing that the, the, the caveat there is that running’s great when you can handle it. So, in his study, he ran this 30 minute jog his heart, his body temperature, got up to 103.2, then I got up to 103.7 during the hot tub. Quote from Alex, my thermal sensation immediately spiked up to eight. Remember the scale here from the article one through 10, so zero, okay, number one, slightly warm.

Brad (30:51):
Number three, warm was where Alex was stuck at for a while during his treadmill run, even though his body temperature was up to 1 0 3. So that’s that delayed effect I’m talking about. And then we go up to very warm, hot, hot number 10 hottest I ever felt. So Alex in the hot tub got up to number eight, very hot and number nine, miserably hot. He says, the water wasn’t warming me up in any significant way because his body temperature going in there was 1 0 3. 0.2, and it only went up to 1 0 3. 0 7. But this is Alex’s quote, it was robbing me of the superficial perception of coolness that I got from air currents and the evaporation of sweat. It’s a good reminder of why cooling techniques like ice towels are simply dumping water on your head can be valuable. They can dramatically change your perception of how hot you are. Continuing Alex’s commentary in the article.

Brad (31:44):
The bad news though, was that my numbers didn’t make sense. While there are no wrong answers on a subjective scale, remember this thermal scale is asking the subject at the Performance Laboratory and Eugene, Oregon campus how you feel. So just like a perceived exertion scale when you’re exercising. And when he did his treadmill test, the scientists had him do a nperceived exertion, which for him ended up between seven and eight minutes mile. He says, to be honest, that was a dumb thing to do for an aging non elite runner because the elite runners that they test in there go between seven and eight minute pace at that a hundred degree temperature. So he kind of pushed himself, uh, a little too hard without knowing it. That’s why at the end of the article, he says, it’s really important to be able to gauge when you’re getting overcooked.

Brad (32:37):
When I got back to my hotel room that afternoon, I realized that I was feeling run out, wrung out as if I’d done a long hard workout rather than a half hour jog. I had missed the mark, I decided to take the next day off, and then dreamed that night of Minson the researcher min’s other research focus, which is ice baths <laugh>. I love that guy’s writing style, man. That’s hilarious. Anyway, um, back to his quote, there’s no wrong answers on the subjective scale, but mine were puzzling as the test proceeded and my core temperature drifted over 100, I kept claiming that I merely felt three outta 10 warm. That might mean that I’m immune to the heat, but not really. More likely, it suggests that I wasn’t properly attuned to my body’s condition. So here’s an elite, former elite runner, Canadian national team, and a leading sports science journalist in the world with specialty of endurance training.

Brad (33:35):
And he’s having trouble tapping in to just how hot his body is getting. I contend that amateurs across the land are perhaps even worse than Alex at their perceived exertion scale and what’s happening in the body. And these are the folks that end up collapsing and getting rushed off in the ambulance. Believe me, they’re out there. I remember when I put on my triathlon for 10 years, what happens is you get hyped up unprepared people pushing themselves too hard and getting themselves into big, big trouble. Uh, at the most extreme, we’re talking about serious stuff and for general admonition, uh, people are, you know, not doing anything associated with full body functional fitness, health, living a healthy, vibrant lifestyle. They’re just torturing their bodies, perhaps as a subconscious need to balance all the comfort and convenience in modern life. And we push this theme pretty hard in, I think it’s chapter seven, like asking you, why do you insist on doing endurance training in a manner that prompts you to struggle and suffer?

Brad (34:46):
What is it about you and your personality? There’s a term, a scientific term coined by researchers from Arizona called the Obligate Runner, and they actually draw a lot of parallels to the obligate runner and the anorexic. So it’s this sense of control, this sense of superiority over one’s peers who aren’t as disciplined. All the accolades that you get from being a devoted, dedicated runner, and you push yourself into this cycle, this pattern of struggling and suffering for a perceived psychological payoff where you can pat yourself on the back and acknowledge how badass you are, but really, uh, putting concerns like health and wellbeing aside, including mental, not only, uh, physical physiological wellbeing, but also your mental health and wellbeing. So, I still didn’t finish Alex’s quote. I kept claiming I was merely three outta 10 warm. If you’re running in the heat, but you’re totally oblivious to how hot you’re getting, that can be a recipe for disaster.

Brad (35:48):
So again, I wanna emphasize, I don’t want to trash, for example, these interesting articles or the great research they’re doing at the Performance Lab at University of Oregon, to help their lead athletes better prepare for important competitions. But for the most of us who are doing this, supposedly for fun health, balancing, life promoting longevity, all that great stuff, exercising in the heat for prolonged periods, maybe we can figure out some alternatives, get in there and push the weights around or do some sprint sessions where again, you’re only going hard for 10 to 20 seconds. You can go out there and do a proper sprint workout in a hundred degree temperatures and live to tell about it afterward because you’ll be indoors pretty soon. Ah, okay. So again, for the highly adapted athlete, endurance running can be a wonderful competitive outlet. I don’t wanna trash the movement in general, uh, but mainly these are the folks that were watching on the Olympics or watching on YouTube.

Brad (36:50):
The elite high school athletes are fascinating how fast they’re getting these days, but very highly trained people. For example, my former podcast guest, Shelby Houlahan, the American record holder at 1500 meters, she pushes her body, her peers, and they push their body to the limits of human endurance. They obtained great satisfaction from racing at the elite level and setting an example, an inspirational example for all runners behind them. They’re generally very strong, vibrant, and healthy, and they’re adapting very well to their training load. And they’re engaging in practices that help balance, stress and rest in life, in many cases, in a superior manner to the average recreational enthusiast that’s trying to emulate what they do. Remember how many times I’ve mentioned in the book and on the podcast that Eluid Kipchoge, the greatest marathon runner of all times two time Olympic gold medalist, the guy who broke two hours in the special event, 1:59 for the marathon is 4:34 pace per mile.

Brad (37:49):
So an absolute running machine. He does 83% of his weekly mileage in zone one at a very, very comfortable pace. I can think of hardly any recreational enthusiasts that are running most of their mileage at zone one. It’s hard enough to get people to stay below the zone two limit, but we look to the greatest of all time, and we learn that he’s running along in zone one for most of his mileage. A hundred of his 130 miles per week are conducted at a pace, which for you and me and everyone else listening, would be a medium or brisk walk in terms of the relative degree of difficulty as measured by, for example, percentage of maximum heart rate. I really love the anecdote during our wonderful two-hour podcast with Shelby Houlahan getting in deep to learn about the mindset and the training practices of one of America’s greatest runners.

Brad (38:47):
And she talked about her, I would call it a low key, intuitive approach where she has the best coaching and very, detailed complex protocols for what she’s doing on the track. You can look up her workouts on YouTube where they go and, and film her and, and, uh, have a really intimate experience, uh, looking at how these runners train. It’s a lot of times there’s, uh, there’s one called, there’s series called Workout Wednesday, but you can look up Shelby Houlahan workout, and they’ll be right with her on the track watching her and timing her, what she’s doing. But that’s only a couple, few days a week, she says. I said, what about the other days? What does your coach have you do? She goes, you know, they just focus on the structured workouts on the track, and the rest of the time she heads out the door every day and runs at whatever pace and whatever distance she feels like, it’s usually eight miles, I believe her saying.

Brad (39:43):
And it’s usually at a pace of, for example, as we saw on this study, uh, seven to eight minutes per mile, maybe nine minutes per mile, if they’re really recovering from something hard. Like her amazing workout that I saw on YouTube, which was 30 times 300 meters at anaerobic threshold with a very only, very short a hundred meter jog in between the 300 meter efforts. And I laugh when she told me during our in-person interview, because one of my favorite workouts is three times, 300 meters. And she said, yeah, one of my workouts is 30 times 300. I’m like, did you just say 30? Oh, okay, yeah, amazing, amazing how hard these people train. But it’s on a foundation of very comfortably paced, of course, high volume exercise where she’s heading out the door every day heading to work like most people, but she’s not in this highly regimented struggle and suffer protocol.

Brad (40:39):
Everything’s well within her capacity, even when she’s busting out 30 times, 300 meters, she can do it. She can keep her pace. Her 27th, 28th, and 29th and 30th, 300 meter efforts are not ugly. They’re graceful and powerful just like her first, second, and third one. So these are the insights that we absolutely desperately need to pull from the world’s elite athletes and help us become convinced to train within our capacity. As I’ve talked about my struggle with minor injuries in my transition to becoming a sprinter and a high jumper, I realize that each of these injuries is an indication that there’s a flaw in my approach. Now, Sue McDonald, former podcast guest, 15 World records in the last year and a half, she said, look, Brad, injuries are inevitable. Don’t beat yourself up too much. They’re gonna happen no matter what. But I also always look back and reflect and try to think, how did I get into this position where my hamstring is feeling tweaked again, and now I have to rest and engage in more rehab?

Brad (41:45):
How can I be smarter in the future with my dispensation of energy so I don’t have to struggle with these injuries or perhaps minimize the risk factors knowing that they will be inevitable? Okay, so, uh, Shelby and the rest, extreme endurance training, whether it’s in the heat or the high altitude, good for them. But I certainly can’t imagine recommending that or thinking that’s, uh, an element of a healthy, happy, vibrant, energetic life to go run 30 minutes in 100 degree heat and then sit in a hot tub for however many more minutes. What do you think? <Laugh>, those of you in hot climates, is your blood boiling right now? Are you nodding your head saying, yeah, maybe Brad’s right? Maybe I should go into the air conditioning? I think, again, we have that cultural programming and that bravado and that macho mentality convincing us that we should head out there and acclimate to the heat and deal with it and give ourselves more pats on the back and more brownie points and check marks because we finished these workouts in extreme heat.

Brad (42:52):
But I would love to convey this point that there’s a better way and a different way to approach your endurance athletics and your overall athletic goals, which is to always keep in mind the stress impact of the workouts. I love how Jay Feldman says that hormesis that popular theory in biohacking and alternative health, that the, uh, brief natural stressors prompt a fitness response or a health response. So, for example, fasting is a hormetic stressor. The ketogenic diet is a hormetic stressor, cold plunging, hot sauna. All these things are so-called hormetic stressors and intended to bring a net positive benefit. But in his wonderful two-part article on Jay Feldman wellness.com, he makes a convincing case that we also have to reflect on the, the, uh, effects of stress in a cumulative manner. So if you were to, let’s say, cold plunge three times a day for five minutes in 39 degree water like mine is right now, that’s why I only go once a day and not every day anymore.

Brad (44:05):
If you were to do it three times a day for the next ten years, are we going to look back and think, man that was super healthy what you did? Or is that needing to be piled on and calculated along with all the EMF exposure you get when you’re on wifi or putting your cell phone to your ear, as well as your sauna practice, as well as your fasting, your ketogenic eating, and your high intensity exercise? And I’m convinced that when you realize the effects of stress are cumulative, it’s very, very important to balance them, moderate them. Of course, we have life that’s too easy and too comfortable, and many people don’t stress themselves enough in a physical sense where they’re not exercising, they’re not moving. They can even gain benefit from a restrictive diet such as fasting or time restrictive feeding. If they, for example, have excess body fat, have poor dietary habits. All these things do indeed prompt health benefits.

Brad (45:00):
The most simple example is fasting where your body works in its most efficient state. When it’s fasted, you have anti-inflammatory, you have a moon immune boosting, you have autophagy. That’s the natural cellular internal cellular detoxification process. All these things are upregulated when you’re in a fasted state because fasting prompts a survival response, your body’s not getting food, so it needs to operate more efficiently. What happens is we take this outta context and think that, well, I guess if that’s true, the more I fast, the healthier I’ll be. And oh, yes, of course, when we engage in a brief high intensity strength training session and put those muscles under stress, they grow back stronger and more resilient. But we fail to recognize or appreciate how the stress and rest must be in balance, otherwise, we will not recover from workouts, and the workouts will actually be counterproductive.

Brad (45:57):
There’s a concept that’s well known to sprinters where if you sprint, do a sprint workout in a fatigued state, such as with sore stiff muscles or whatever’s causing you to feel, uh, less than snappy when you’re going through your warmups, if you insist on performing the workout in a fatigue state, you are literally training your body to run slower because the central nervous system, the one that fires the muscles and helps you go fast and powerful, it’s because it’s fatigued. It’s protecting you by running slower. So if you get slower times in the workout on this day because you feel a little tired and sluggish, you are training your body to run those slower times and you indeed would be better off with a day of rest and coming back when you feel strong, powerful, and snappy. That is the sprinter’s mentality that I am now trying to embody as hard as I can and to reject, aggressively reject any latent leftover endurance mentality where the mindset is more, is better, and, uh, rest is for WSIs.

Brad (47:08):
And let’s count up our weekly mileage because that’s directly correlated with how our fitness is gonna progress. And it’s so amazing to see decades later this mentality prevailing even when you, uh, listen to interviews with elite athletes, they’ll talk about, well, you know, I was, I was going 70, 80 miles a week in the winter, and now I’m up to 90 and I can’t wait till the big championships. And that’s okay for them to say, because their training protocols are carefully structured and orchestrated, and indeed they can perceive the increased endurance and resiliency when they up their weekly mileage. But everything’s so carefully controlled that I don’t think we should listen to them. And we should instead reflect on doing the best we can and taking the resources that we’re given each day as far as how much energy we have and time we have, and applying them in a correct and sensible manner to our exercise goals, including staying inside in the air conditioning instead of struggling and suffering out there in the heat.

Brad (48:09):
Thank you for listening. Watching again, great job by Alex Hutchinson going into the the heat lab at Eugene Oregon, training like a pro as hell. Here’s what I learned. And then the other article with sensible information, the Complete Runner’s Guide to Running and Racing In the Heat. But if I had a chance to add, you know, number seven to the list, it would be like, Hey, why don’t you skip those races and come back into the competitive arena in the fall, in the winter? <laugh>, Thanks for listening, watching podcast@bradventures.com. Lemme know what you think.

Brad (48:46):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.