Due to heatwaves, marathon runners are forced to change their training strategies and race plans. For example, the Cape Town Marathon was moved from February to May to avoid extreme heat.
A recent heatwave over the weekend after Thursday, July, prompted Jen Dimasso-Donohue to purchase an Omius cooling wrap. During a 7-mile run in Massachusetts, when the temperature exceeded 27°C at 10 am, she took a dip in the ocean near Cape Cod. She noted that she felt on the edge, deciding to order the device immediately.
Dimasso-Donohue, who is preparing for the New York Marathon, had long followed this wrap after seeing Sifan Hassan use it to win gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics. This project manager from New York believes the wrap has already paid off in terms of her mental health, and she has incorporated it into her regular runs, refreshing the moisture every half hour to maintain the cooling effect.
Every marathon season, runners like her develop strategies that take into account not only weekly mileage but also small details critical for race day: what nutritional gels they can tolerate and which shoes are best suited. Climate change has become a variable that cannot be ignored.
Frequent heatwaves in New York, prolonged drought in London, and record summers in Hong Kong create conditions of high temperature and humidity that hinder the body's natural cooling. Although training in harsh weather conditions was long considered normal for marathoners, modern extreme conditions are affecting training schedules and race days, which can impact safety and performance.
Coaches advise runners not just to endure the difficulties, but to adjust their pace, run during cooler times of the day, and, if necessary, move indoors. The alternative is heat exhaustion, and in extreme cases, heatstroke, a condition that can threaten life and damage the brain and other organs.
The running app Runna found that 80% of its users either adapt or skip runs due to the heat; this figure reaches 92% in the Sun Belt of America. The app released a heat adaptation update that uses local weather data to adjust the subscriber's pace, helping to maintain the same level of training effort that would be achieved on a cooler day.
As Steph Kessel, lead coach at Runna, explains, the body has to work much harder to self-cool in high temperatures. She asserts that with the right approach, adjusting training sessions and reducing pace in hot conditions provides the same training effect as running at a faster pace on a cool day, because bodies react to effort, not pace.