KEEPING A COOL HEAD
After months of searching for the right tudung for running, Syida Lizta Amirul Ihsan finds one she likes, although it’s not exactly made for sports
IWAS about 200m before the end of my 21km training run last month when it finally dawned on me that my search for the perfect tudung for running might have ended. And I wasn’t even wearing a sports hijab to start with.
On my head was the inner hijab from Uniqlo’s Hana Tajima line, which was made using the brand’s Airism technology to keep you cool.
There are T-shirts, shorts and other clothing pieces made using this fabric technology, but I think few have been tested harder than through a 21km run on a hot and humid day.
When I began running again three months ago, I realised that finding the right tudung was going to be a huge challenge. For one, no international sports brand with good fabric technology produces it.
Secondly, some local brands for Muslimah sportswear have this in their stable and I found them good for 10km or so, but beyond that, my head started feeling warm and heated.
Like choosing the right pair of running shoes, the right tudung will ease you through your runs and the wrong ones will just make your head feel like it’s in a moving sauna.
WHAT’S NEEDED
There are some criteria I require. Firstly, a sports tudung must be able to keep my head cool, no matter how many kilometres I have covered. The longer I run, the hotter my body gets and I need cooling fabric that doesn’t insulate heat underneath it.
It also has to stay put without the help of a hairband so I can run in peace and not stop by the roadside to pull unruly hair back into my tudung. I usually tuck my tudung underneath my running top so length isn’t a problem for me. I need the fabric to be thin but not transparent.
While all that may be too much for a tudung to do, Uniqlo’s Hana Tajima inner hijab, which covers the head and part of the neck, ticks all the important boxes.
I hadn’t intended this to be a running tudung, but as I was browsing in Uniqlo in Petaling Jaya’s 1Utama Shopping Centre one day, I realised that given the superior Airism technology, this one might just work.
And it did. Very well. At the end of the run, the inner was wet, but my head didn’t feel overheated, like it did seven days earlier when I wore another tudung.
It’s slightly tight around the neck instead of just a triangle-shaped hijab. This means the inner doesn’t budge so throughout the run, the amount of hair that comes out is minimal. I liked that. It gave me one less thing to think about.
Because it’s made as part of a fashion line, it is enhanced with a pleat near the face which to me, is unnecessary. Had it been just plain and rounded around the face, it’d be perfect. But then again, I am the one who is using it beyond its suggested use, so it’s really not the product’s fault.
Right now, I am waiting for Uniqlo to come up with its sports line (its current line veers towards athleisure) and I am sure the people behind it will include Airism in their running tops and bottoms and I think, by then, there is a big possibility that even my whole running wardrobe will come from a brand that’s not even anchored in sports.
“Firstly, a sports tudung must be able to keep my head cool, no matter how many kilometres I have covered.”