Marathoner Jess McClain took home an eighth-place finish at the World Athletics Championship in Tokyo last month.
McClain is based in Phoenix, so the runner, sponsored by Brooks, has experience training in the heat. But, the humidity in Tokyo in September can get as high as 80% and training in the Valley couldn’t help McClain acclimate to that.
So, she turned to Arizona State University, and spent time training in the Clinical Research Service’s environmental chamber, which could simulate the heat and humidity of Japan's
capital city.
The chamber can mimic environments from around the world — with temperatures ranging from about 39 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit and 20% to 90% humidity.
It looks like a big walk-in refrigerator and can fit a few treadmills. ASU has had the facility for about a year.
Ellie Iwersen, a clinical exercise physiologist at ASU, and Bridget Sopeña, principal exercise physiologist at Brooks Running, joined The Show.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Ellie, let me start with you, is the purpose for which Jess McClain was using the chamber its main purpose?
ELLIE IWERSEN: Yeah. So, in the exercise physiology world, this is a pretty common usage, I guess you could say. You can use it for metabolic testing. We use it for ... heat acclimation. So just getting Jess kind of trained up so that when she is in Tokyo she's able to, you know, handle that high humidity a bit better.
And so you see this commonly. It's a great resource, something we were excited to, one, offer at ASU, but then, to our community, to Jess, to the Brooks Running team, and yeah, it's cool. We do all types of research to training in it.
BRODIE: So Bridget, how did you get hooked up with this? And, I guess, why was this maybe a better option in this case than, for example, sending the runner to train in a place that was just more humid naturally outside?
BRIDGET SOPEÑA: Yeah. So, working with Jess earlier in the summer when we found out that she qualified for Tokyo, we knew she lived in the heat, but we knew it was typically a drier heat and I knew that humidity was going to be a big hurdle in Tokyo, and so I started brainstorming on ways that she could still get that humidity exposure without having to leave Arizona.
Because we also don't want to add additional stress to these athletes by sending them away from their home leading up to such a big race. A very big component of athlete performance is rest and relaxation and low stress. So, wanted her to be able to stay put in her home right outside of Phoenix.
And I had contacts at ASU from my time at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute previously. So, I reached out to them to see if we could connect and provide some services for Jess in order to get her the necessary humidity exposure that would get her both mentally and physically prepped for the Tokyo heat and humidity.
BRODIE: So, Bridget, what is the plan then? If you have a runner who is maybe not used to the humidity, or maybe not used to the heat, and is going to participate in a competition in a place that has one or both of those, I assume you don't just, like, blast up the, you know, the thermostat initially and have them run for a while.
Like, how do you try to acclimate the body to those things?
SOPEÑA: It really depends on where they live and where they're going to be competing in. So, we had actually — four of the six marathoners that qualified for Tokyo for Team USA were Brooks athletes. And so we had similar strategies for all of them, but they all live in different parts of the country. So, each of their strategies looked different based off of where they lived.
Some people had to use a heat chamber at other universities. Some people just lived in high heat, high, humid areas like in the East Coast. But there are other ways that if, just say they don't have access to a heat chamber or they don't live in somewhere that's hot or humid, you can do other types of acclimation, like hot tub, sauna sessions.
I would say they're not as impactful is actually exercising in those conditions, but they can get you some exposure to prepare an athlete for the physiological strain of heat and humidity.
BRODIE: So, Ellie, I know that anybody who has spent time, you know, in Florida or on the East Coast in the summer, D.C., like, they understand the difference between the kind of heat that you get in Arizona and, you know, the kind of heat that also comes with humidity. But when you are an elite athlete, what is the difference between, you know, when you have to perform in that, maybe not quite being acclimated to one or the other or both?
IWERSEN: Yeah. So, I mean, if, like you're saying out in Florida, you can normally — you can feel that humidity on you, right. It's a little sticky. Your hair maybe gets a little frizzy. And so that's, if you think of that in an exercise for the elite athletes, especially for Jess, right, she has the heat on her side being from Phoenix.
Going into that chamber, we had it around 70%, built her up to 80% relative humidity. So it's very damp, it's very heavy. With elite athletes, we want to, one, consider safety. So make sure that they're able to change their sweat rate and adapt to that humidity to better handle that high heat. And then that just goes — it's a long marathon, so being able to maintain pace, make sure you're fueling properly, you're feeling good in it.
It feels very different when you're used to running outside in a drier temperature. So, a lot more sweat, it feels heavier, little more tight. And so it gives an edge up being able to, one, mentally get used to that feeling, but then also making sure they're safe, their body's able to respond to those heat changes and we're able to maximize their performance.
SOPEÑA: I'll just add into that, when athletes are prepared for the humidity — so when these elite marathoners are training dry heat versus, I'll call it "wet heat," sweat doesn't evaporate as easily in humid conditions. And so these athletes need to get their bodies used to competing and training in the humid conditions because that leads to an earlier onset of sweating, which allows them to start cooling themselves easier.
It can possibly increase their sweating rate and it makes it more effective for them to — or it makes a more effective heat loss for them once they get used to that humidity, because their body then adapts to that and knows, "hey, I'm working harder in the heat, so now I need to work more to cool myself," because the evaporative cooling isn't going to be as efficient as it normally is in dry heat.
BRODIE: Well, yeah, Bridget, I wanted to ask you about that because I wonder if maybe having that exposure to being in a hot, humid environment, even if it's not sort of in the world, like, does that maybe change how an athlete prepares for a race? Maybe, you know, what they eat or drink beforehand, or maybe even how much water or hydration they take along the route, given changes in the climate from what they're used to.
SOPEÑA: Absolutely. So, sweating rate and therefore sweat sodium concentration is definitely impacted by environmental conditions, exercise intensity and duration, and all of those factors. So if, for instance, we sweat tested Jess in the Tokyo-like conditions in the heat chamber with Ellie, she led that sweat testing, and that allowed us to see what Jess' sweat rate and sodium rate of loss was in Tokyo conditions.
If we would have tested her a month or two before that, her needs may have been different, because, at that time, she wasn't as heat acclimated or prepared for the humidity, which increases the sweating rate and therefore changes the needs for sodium and fluid needs as well, during the race.
BRODIE: And Ellie, am I right that this is the highest you've ever bumped up the humidity for an experiment like this?
IWERSEN: Yep, our chamber, it is. So and that was what was exciting about this opportunity and getting to work with Jess and Bridget. It's been used for research up until Jess kind of hopped in there. So it was high humidity, but not 80% — probably more around like a 40% to 60% relative humidity is what a lot of the research was happening at.
So getting Jess in there, it was kind of an experiment in its own of seeing how our chamber would adapt, seeing what that really felt like in a smaller room, and, yeah, it did it well. It handled it great, Jess handled it great. We were definitely a little, you know, sticky. It was damp in there, but it was really cool. It was an awesome time to use that and kind of push that limit a bit.
BRODIE: So, Bridget, obviously, as you've discussed, there's a physiological benefit to having a runner train in the environment that they're going to be competing in. I wonder if there's also sort of a psychological benefit that, you know, in this case, Jess knew that sort of what she was getting herself into, what it was going to feel like when she got to Tokyo, and maybe that helped with the psychological training as well?
SOPEÑA: A hundred percent. I think that was a major factor. I think it's arguably as important as the psychological component of it. When you're getting off that plane and you're getting into Tokyo, that humidity just hits you and it's hard to breathe if you're not used to it. And so that — I had spoken to her before and after the race, and she said that, she's like, "I just — it didn't faze me, you know, I knew what to expect. I knew mentally what to expect, breathing and just how I would feel."
And so that alone is a really big — that gives her a really big advantage to some others that might not have prepared as much in that humid conditions, like working on your breathing. You also might not want to eat and drink as much as you normally do, but you have to train your body to be more comfortable in that. So that can impact every part of your strategy throughout the race. And that clearly didn't faze her very much.
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