The G Running Diary

I Feel Like a Fat Little Bagel: 7/31/03

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We did a lot of heat training leading up to Badwater. To heat train, we sit in a sauna for up to an hour and drink a whole lot of water. The sessions started off at about 30 minutes and gradually built up. We also added extra clothes, so my outfit was shorts and a top, and a PVC jacket with a hood. PVC is plastic that does not breathe. The gym we went to, 24-hour Fitness in Mountain View, had a steam room in addition to the sauna. Since the steam room was always hotter, we spent some time in there too. In those early sessions it was unbearable. First I was baked in the dry sauna and then steamed in the steam room and then baked in the sauna again. Isn't this what they do to bagels?

Although the steam room environment is nothing like Death Valley, the higher heat index was useful in heat training. The theory is that your body gets used to the higher temperatures and is better able to absorb fluids. If the weather is hot, you sweat a lot. If you drink to replace what you lost, your body is only able to process that water at a certain rate. The rest of it gets flushed. So, if you can increase your absorption rate from a typical, say, 20 ounces an hour to 60 ounces an hour, you could last a lot longer in the heat. Supposedly your body will also manage salt better through all this, so your sweat won't flush out all your sodium. This training is considered essential to Badwater. In "Running on the Sun," runners were shown jogging in place in a sauna and running on a treadmill in a plastic raincoat with the dryer exhaust at chest level. I can smile now, but on the road to Badwater this is all perfectly normal. A few times during our sauna training, someone would ask what we were doing and why were we wearing jackets. I liked answering, "because I'm cold," or "I'm trying to lose weight." I would also explain the real reason. That, of course, sounded weirder to them than any of my little jokes.