S3E3: Heat vs. Altitude Training: The Science Behind Both

For years, I think the narrative was, go somewhere cool, go somewhere high.

You're going to get, quote, altitude training.

And we just knew that that was good.

And it was, you get better by breathing thinner air.

And that was just sort of the extent of it, right? And frankly, that is the essence of why you're going to go and train at altitude.

It's the essence.

It's sort of the catalyst for a lot of the adaptations that you do get.

when you're training at altitude.

But what about those of us who are stuck think Dripping Springs, Texas, where I actually live is maybe 400 feet above sea level.

What about those of us who are living in climates where it might be, I don't know, 95, 100 degrees from June until, gosh, I wish it wasn't almost Halloween, but I think sometimes it is for the high temps.

We're looking at 70, 75, 80 degrees sometimes in July, August in the mornings.

What do we do about that? Now, obviously, for a long time, we heard about great locales to go and train.

We've got your folks up in Flagstaff, a lot of my good friends, a lot of my colleagues were in Flagstaff.

We've got Boulder, Colorado, Provo, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, which is interesting.

Albuquerque was actually one of the hotbeds for distance running, especially elite runners, especially lots of East African runners were in Albuquerque for years.

University of New Mexico still sort of holds down the fort in that regard.

It has one of the finest, finest programs in the NCAA all at altitude, right? But, you know, we start looking at how we utilize our environment to our advantage.

And when we start looking at becoming good distance runners, we want to run faster.

We want to run farther without going into what we refer to as oxygen debt.

I mean, this is just...

Running 101.

This is the stuff that we heard even from when we were little kids.

You know, it's like all that lactic acid was building up, right? And running aerobically.

You hear me talk about this all the time.

What do we do when we're training in a hot environment and what are the impacts on that physiologically? And it's actually maybe a little bit more complex than some people may believe.