The Heat Guide - for coaches and ambitious athletes (EN)

**The complete Heat Guide about preparing, training and performing in the heat — and using heat as a training stimulus.**

Of 1,258 major endurance races, more than a quarter took place in moderate to extreme heat; leave out the marathon and that share rises to roughly half. For the endurance runner, heat is gradually becoming the rule rather than the exception.

The usual running literature treats heat mainly as bad luck: something to survive, with the chief advice being to drink enough. That picture leaves two things out.

The first is that the damage is measurable and predictable — there is an optimal racing window, and beyond it performance falls by a fixed margin per degree.

The second matters more: dosed well, heat is one of the most powerful and cheapest training stimuli a runner has, working along the same route as an altitude camp but without the mountain.

This guide brings both sides together: heat as an opponent to be understood and limited, and heat as a stimulus to be applied deliberately. It is built from mechanism to adaptation, and from adaptation to the protocol of race day. Behind every claim stands a full reference with DOI, and every chapter ends in training practice.

**What is inside**

- The physiology of heat load: where the heat comes from, how it leaves the body, and why the thermometer misleads

- Two kinds of heat fatigue: the brake of perception alongside the limit of the system

- Acclimation and acclimatisation, passive heating, and the haematological gain that touches on altitude's

- Fluid, sodium and fuel in the heat — with the nuance the common advice misses

- Cooling as an ergogenic intervention: pre- and per-cooling, ice slurry, menthol, hand and palm cooling, new technology

- Race day on a single timeline: from T-24 hours to the finish, warm-up and pacing

- Recognising and treating heat illness

Plus a glossary in which every technical term is briefly explained.

**A few things you will find here and rarely elsewhere**

- The optimal window, and the price per degree beyond: not a vague discomfort, but a quantity you can work with.

- Why cooling's laboratory gain shrinks in a race; the distinction between imposed and self-paced effort, which is almost never made.

- The dose trap of ice slurry: why the highest dose yields no performance gain, while the physics promises the opposite.

- Menthol does not cool: it works through perception, and that changes what you can expect of it.

- Honest about the skew: heat research rests largely on men; where that bears on the conclusion, it is stated plainly.

**Who it is for**

Coaches and ambitious athletes who want to perform in warm conditions, and who want to treat heat as a trainable, plannable condition rather than something to improvise on afresh each year.

**Extent**

111 pages · 20 figures · 53 scientific sources (with DOI) · glossary