Adaptions

Last week was supposed to be a hard training week but I managed to catch a virus and so this means a three week taper, but I thought I’d step up slightly this week and so last night ran a gentle 90 mins Zone 2 run. The sort of run where my Heart Rate should be around 135 bpm average here in the tropics. But it wasn’t and it was 146 average, which meant a lot of the time was spent running above this and at threshold HR, despite running at a zone 2 effort. How is this possible, you ask?

Well it’s actually quite interesting and it took me a lot of research to understand. Because of the high humidity here, often being 85-98%, sweat doesn’t evaporate. The temp is usually 30-34C when I’m running, so there is a lot of sweat and I lose about 1KG/hr even when drinking 1 litre fluid/hr (which I find simply staggering by the way), but it’s the evaporation process that helps cool the body, not the process of sweating.

Consequently the body starts to overheat and its physiological reaction to this is that the heart then starts to increase blood flow close to the skin, in order to increase cooling. Hence the elevated heart rate. For about 18 months I’ve been trying to find out if this means I’m burning more glycogen, instead of primarily fat oxygenation that we want in endurance activities, and from what I can find it is certainly affecting my body’s glycogen usage… which can mean an earlier total wipe out during the Ironman run. So I really must stay in Zone 2 HR, not just Z2 “effort”. What I have found is that once I’ve lost control over my HR, it becomes almost impossible to lower it again while exercising. I’ll be running incredibly slowly but my HR can literally be at HR Max. In other words the engine has overheated and the wheels are about to fall off.

One month away from the tropics, running in the UK, where my pace was 30s/km faster with a HR 10-15 bpm lower, or 1km/minute faster for the same HR, to now back to the slower tropical pace I’ve trained at for the past four years, but now with a HR that is 15 bps faster than before I left, and a whopping 25 beats per minute faster than last week in the UK, even at this slower tropical running pace.

How much of this can be attributed to jet lag, and how much is physiological adaptions to a month of training in the UK, I don’t know, but I hope to readapt to the tropics extremely quickly!!!

It’s interesting how the deeper you get involved in a subject, the more rabbit holes you find. I have no idea what your average recreational angler, who perhaps fishes only a few days/month, makes of Sexyloops!! We are concerned with seemingly microscopic details and can argue about them for months and often years on the Board!  Does any of it matter? Of course it does! Everything both matters and doesn’t matter at the same time.

Here in Malaysia most visiting anglers experience a phenomena the locals call “white man’s foot”. Standing in the boat, fishing all day, and white men’s feet expand to twice their normal size and we all go around looking like Big Foot. It’s impossible to put shoes on afterwards, with these two abnormally sized feet at the end of your legs. There doesn’t appear to be any other issues and this is quite “normal”, although why it occurs I don’t know. Probably for the same reasons above.

My feet do not do this nowadays incidentally, but it took them years to stop doubling in size. And before you ask, no the penis doesn’t double in size as well. Interestingly, when I go back to the UK, where the temps last time had a daytime maximum of 23C (which is the minimum night time temp here) and for much of the time was in the teens of centigrade, my feet were painful — not agony pain, but constantly sore. Cold to touch and sore and stiff for the entire duration of the trip. I went to a steam room in a gym a few times and placed them close to the steam outlet, which helped, but only a temporary reprieve.

The human body is a fascinating machine. We often pride ourselves with how adaptable we humans are, but the truth is I think, we are only actually comfortable in about a 10 degrees temperature band, which we can move around through acclimatising. However the acclimatising period is not 2-4 weeks as many people believe, but instead I think it takes years to be fully acclimatised. Otherwise why do we feel cold in the winter and also hot in the summer? Spend all of our time in summer and it will feel comfortable. Spend all of our time in winter and that will feel comfortable too. But try to do both in one year and we will feel the effects of both.

Right-o. I’m heading back to the boat! One week of fishing, lessons, swimming, in-boat biking and then I head over to Langkawi next week for a very challenging Ironman. Look out Snakehead!

Have a great week.

Cheers, Paul