Canada will be ready when the heat is on
TORONTO — When Canada’s Lanni Marchant and Krista DuChene stepped up to the marathon start line at the 2013 world championships, it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was high, and the temperature in Moscow had soared to a sizzling 35 degrees with the humidex.
It was the perfect storm of hot air and little shade, the type of conditions that cause the body to shut down.
And 23 women — a third of the field — didn’t make it to the finish line that day.
DuChene collapsed 12 kilometres in, and was whisked to hospital in an ambulance ride she barely remembers.
Marchant experienced cramping so severe that, at the suggestion of a fellow racer, she stabbed her contorted left thigh muscle with a safety pin to try relieve the spasms. She would eventually cross 44th of the 46 runners who finished.
“It was hot, girls were dropping within the first 5K, literally just collapsing in front of us,” Marchant said.
It’s a scene that athletes, particularly in endurance events, could face in 2020 at the Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo, where the heat was blamed for 116 deaths last month, a fourfold increase from July of last year.
The thermometer hit 41 C just outside Tokyo on July 23, the highest-ever recorded temperature in Japan. The record heat wave has Olympic organizers bracing for the worst.
Meteorologist Doug Charko, who’s worked with the Canadian team at five Olympic Games, spent last week in Japan gathering data.
“Certainly average conditions in Tokyo are very warm and humid compared to Canadian standards, so even going in we knew that heat is what we’re going to be focusing on,” Charko said.
Tokyo’s organizing committee is implementing measures to deal with Mother Nature. The marathons will start at 7 a.m., the triathlons at 8 a.m., and the race walking events at 6 and 7 a.m., to minimize athletes’ exposure to extreme conditions. Trees are being planted along the marathon course for shade.
There will be misting stations.
A layer of solar heat-blocking pavement is being laid down on roadways.
The idea of implementing daylight time was recently floated.
Canadian athletes say they’ll be prepared for whatever the weather throws at them.
Half an hour before his race, you’ll likely find Evan Dunfee immersed in an ice bath.
The race walker who famously finished fourth at the Rio Games — he was in third before he was bumped by Japan’s Hirooki Arai of Japan late in the race — has a detailed protocol for hot, humid weather that includes submerging himself in an ice bath and doing his warm up in an ice vest.
“The big thing is keeping your core temperature under that critical level where your body starts to shut down because it thinks you’re in danger,” said Dunfee, who takes in about four litres of water in a 50K race.
“We use a few strategies to trick our body ... bring that core temperature down a degree or two just to prolong in the race how long it takes to build back up toward that critical temperature.”