Discussion: Dry heat!

It makes such a difference! I don't know why people think Arizonans are making it up!

And where's my relay answer!

You are in the wrong log.

I second that, having abandoned a run in 66F and 89% humidity (according to yr.no) this morning!

I only recently learnt why humidity affects the body so much (I’m sure you know this, but basically because sweat can’t evaporate) and it all makes so much sense now.

But be careful. Supposedly, the dry allows breathe droplets to evaporate and become lighter. Virus particles can then spread much further. In the nice humid, muggy swamps of the East, the droplets stay heavy and drop out of circulation quickly.

Must be true. I read it on the web.

My general rule of thumb is that temperatures of 30C and above are challenging, regardless of the humidity, and dewpoints of 20C and above are challenging, regardless of the temperature. Low humidity won't help much if it's near or over 40.

(Personal "bests" for running: 42C temperature (Melbourne, 2009) and 29C dewpoint (Beijing, 2005). The latter did at least give me some good stories to scare aspiring Olympic marathoners with).

Omg both of those “PBs” sound miserable.

Total agreement on a 20C dewpoint as a cutoff. It rarely gets that high in Tucson, even during the monsoon season. My worst running weather memories definitely come from muggy Texas mornings with dewpoints In the low 20s rather than Tucson evenings at 35.

I'd imagine you'd have had a few "challenging" days in Djibouti, too.

Sometime around late 2007/early 2008 someone from the Australian Olympic Committee rang the Bureau of Meteorology wanting to find out about likely conditions in Beijing and got put through to me. I think they were quite surprised to be talking to someone who at least had pretensions of being an elite athlete and had experience of training in Beijing at that time of year (my 2005 conference was in the same week that the Olympics was three years later).

Ugh humidity. And yet people still get angry when my club hosts champs races in the fall when the woods are super open and there aren’t 40C humidex days.

I was in Djibouti during the "winter" so it wasn't as challenging as it could have been. I do have a dewpoint of 77F/25C noted for a couple of runs, which is pretty unpleasant, though those would have been morning runs, lacking most of the burning trash smoke. I don't think we got above 40C for temperature, and I had a crepuscular running schedule, anyway, so I wouldn't have headed out during the highs.

Incidentally, Boris is not that far away from my observation site name of the week, "35 MILES WEST-SOUTHWEST OF CHOTEAU MT", whose existence I became aware of because it's observed the lowest temperature in the continental US on each of the last two nights (32F each time). A look at a map suggests there probably isn't anywhere else much closer than 35 miles to there...

My friend from Kongo says it's never as bad in Drambuie as on the Gulf Coast supposedly due to some breeze.

I was in Djibouti in the summer (albeit for just a few days). Never been so hot.

One of my problems w/ Arizona in the summer is the hot surfaces. Metal railings and car steering wheels don't care about humidity ...