Wet-Bulb Stupidity and Why Running Zones Matter

The Book

The Book - Atmasvasth - A Guide to Ageing Healthfully

A 15-point guide to living long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

The Detailed 15-Point Guide to Live Long, Healthy

The 15-Point Guide - Detailed

The detailed 15-points guide to live long, healthy

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

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This is a follow-up to last week's piece.

Heat: The Invisible Barrier to Long-Term Health and Longevity

As heatwaves increase, we have to be more and more careful of protecting ourselves to prevent damage to our body and organs, using any means possible, both short-term and long-term

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

This morning I was due for my Zone 1 run, which means a heart rate  under 125, averaging around 121. When I left home at 6 AM, it was 26 deg C, with 86% humidity and a wet-bulb, dew-point of 23 deg. This is a high hazard situation, and unless acclimatized, you should stay at home or just go for a walk. I am acclimatized and a Zone 1 run of 45 minutes was an acceptable workout for this weather before sunrise.

I ran into a wall of runners taking part in some race organized by the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) formerly called UDCT.  It was sheer stupidity on the part of the organizers to actually hold a race/run in this weather...I could see runners sweating, tired and obviously dehydrated...the smarter ones were just walking and taking it easy. 

Heat and humidity of this sort injure the body and while those in their 20s and 30s will usually recover quickly without any permanent damage, those in their 50s and older...and there were many in that age range...could land up with serious heat stroke related issues. 

Sweat and Science: How Wet-Bulb Temperature Dictates Safe Outdoor Exercise

High heat and high humidity cause high wet-bulb temperatures, which can be potentially lethal

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

The organizers should not have held the race and if they did want to for whatever reason, they should have converted it into a walking race. For a premier technical institute on par with the IITs, where specifications and metrics are all-important, it was “wet-bulb” stupidity to ignore the one metric - ambient heat stress - that could determine whether a runner goes home or collapses.

For all the past 23 years that I have been running and racing, all my runs used to be tempo runs at maximum intensity because I didn’t know any better, until about 3-4 years ago, when I realized that an ageing body needs rest as much as it needs to “move”. While brisk walking is a great way to be physically active, running is better, if you are up to it. Running for me is also my “zen” time and my “music listening” time and I enjoy the solitude.

Runnnn...Not Race!

You don’t need to run marathons to run for health

AtmasvasthBhavin Jankharia

But age matters. And mid last year, I switched to 2-3 days of running per week with a Zone 1, Zone 2 and Tempo run schedule. A Zone 1 run is at target heart rate of around 120, Zone 2, at around 132 and a Tempo run around 148-150, with a few minutes at 158, which is around 90% of my maximum heart rate. All of this is calculated by the Apple Watch automatically and I just look at the watch and adjust the intensity of my run to the desired heart rate.

While I target most runs for around an hour, the weather matters. If the temperate is low, say in Lonavala with low humidity, then the runs are longer, but when the humidity or temperature or both are high, like today, the intensity and duration are much lower. 

This is a table of what happens with the 3 zones in case you are interested in diving deeper. 

Typically, the 80-20 rule works. 20% of the running should be hard (tempo) and 80% in zones 1 and 2. I achieve this consecutive runs of Zones 1 and 2, which are longer and a slightly shorter Tempo run.

Those of you over 50 who are still running and racing should give this some thought. Inputting all your run data into an LLM like Claude, allows the LLM to understand your runs, your heart rate, intensity and the variation with weather which can then guide you to run better and smarter. I have taken my run data from October to today to show how the three zones work.

The important thing is to run and not stop, and to do it smartly without injuring your body or subjecting it to harsh extremes of weather, which for us in Mumbai is all about heat and humidity.