It was the heat wave over the Fourth of July weekend that finally pushed Jen Dimascio-Donohue to hit the “checkout” button on an item that had been sitting in her cart for months. After an 11-kilometer run in Massachusetts, with temperatures above 27 degrees Celsius by 10 a.m., she jumped into the ocean off Cape Cod to cool down. Literally.’” “It” was a $234 cooling headband called Omius.
Dimascio-Donohue, who’s training for the New York City Marathon, had been eyeing it since watching Sifan Hassan wear one while winning gold at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. The New York-based project manager says the band has “already paid for itself in my sanity,” and she’s since worked it into her regular runs, rewetting it every 30 minutes or so to refresh the cooling effect. Every marathon season, runners like Dimascio-Donohue strategize about more than just how many miles a week to train.
They focus on details that can make or break race day: which nutrition gels they can tolerate, which shoes work best for their feet. Climate change has become a variable they can’t ignore. New York City’s frequent heat waves, London’s extended dry spell and Hong Kong’s record-breaking summer have all brought the kind of high temperatures and humidity that make it harder for the body to cool itself.
Training through miserable weather has long been a rite of passage for marathoners, but today’s extremes are affecting training schedules and race days in ways that can affect safety and performance. Instead of telling them to just push through, trainers are advising runners to adjust their pace, run during cooler times of the day and move indoors if need be. The alternative: heat exhaustion, and in extreme cases heatstroke, a potentially life-threatening condition that can damage the brain and other organs.
The coaching app Runna found that 80% of its users adapt or skip their runs because of hot weather; in America’s Sun Belt, that figure rises to 92%. It introduced a heat-adaptation update that uses local weather data to adjust a subscriber’s pace, helping them maintain the same training effort they would on a cooler day. As Steph Kessell, lead coach for Runna explains, the body has to work much harder to cool itself in high temperatures.
Our bodies don’t know pace, they know effort.” The approach reflects an increasing emphasis from exercise scientists on training the body to cope with heat stress. Chris Douge, a business developer from New York who’s training for the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 11, has incorporated visits to the sauna three times a week. Managing the heat, he says, is “significantly more important than the shoes I wear.” He adds: “I consider training for the heat equivalent to training for hills on a course.” There is a physiological basis to this approach, says Christopher Minson, a professor of human physiology at the University of Oregon who studies exercise and thermoregulation.
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