Heat Training

By late April, I’m already rethinking what I carry. The shoe decision stays mostly consistent through the seasons — different for singletrack versus beach versus road, but those choices don’t change with temperature. What does change is everything else: how much water I’m hauling, what I’m putting on my skin, what fabric I’m wearing, and whether I need a headlamp at all. Florida summer starts earlier than people expect. By the time June arrives, you’re fully in it, but the real adjustment happens in April and May, when the dew point climbs past 65 and doesn’t come back down until October. I’ve been running these conditions for over a decade and made most of the gear mistakes that are possible to make. ...

For most of the year, I have a rough sense of what a good workout looks like in terms of pace. An easy long run through Fort Clinch singletrack comes in around 9:30 to 10:00 per mile. A solid tempo effort on the Parkway sits somewhere in the 7:30 to 8:00 range. I’ve run these routes often enough that I mostly check my watch to confirm what I already feel. Then late April arrives. Not all of April — the first two weeks are still fine. But somewhere around the third week, the numbers start lying. ...

Something shifts in the third week of April here. Not dramatically — it doesn’t happen overnight — but you notice it. The 6 AM temperature that was 58 degrees in mid-March is 68 now, sometimes 70. The dew point that held steady in the low 50s starts edging up toward 60, then 65. The sweat on your shirt at the end of a 10-miler isn’t quite the same as it was a month ago. Florida summer is announcing itself, and if you’re paying attention, you can feel exactly when the season starts its slow takeover. ...