Tips for running in the summer heat

Unless someone has actually been to Michigan in July or August, they usually tend to think of my home state as being cold--crazy frigid winters and tepid summers. Temperature-wise, Michigan doesn't have many days over 100 degrees during the summer; but the humidity here makes it feel much hotter.

There is a reason that humidity sucks so much for exercise. Humidity is the amount of moisture in the air; and sweating during exercise is meant to keep you cool by evaporating off of your skin. Well, when the air is full of moisture already (humidity), the sweat doesn't evaporate from your skin. This results in a drenched-in-sweat body that can't cool off because there is nowhere for that moisture to go.

Even more important than humidity, however, is the dew point. The dew point is the temperature at which the air is saturated with water vapor. The higher the dew point temperature, the more uncomfortably sticky and humid it feels; and the closer the dew point is to actual air temperature, the more uncomfortable it will be.

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