I had a recipe all ready to go for today, but I saw something on my run this morning that got me to thinking.
If you live on the East Coast, you know we’re having a hot summer. Here in NC, we’ve already had some ridiculous number of above-90-degree days–and it’s not even August yet. The local forecast for the next few days looks like this:
Add in the Southern humidity, and it’s downright toasty around here. Exercising in that kind of heat can be a real challenge.
Hopefully we’re all being mindful of the obvious things: work out early to avoid the heat of the day, be sure to stay hydrated, try to find shade, etc. But here’s one that not every one thinks about: stay away from cotton.
This morning when I headed out for my run, it was already 81 degrees. As I was heading home (forty minutes later, so there’s no telling what the mercury was up to by then), I passed a guy really huffing and puffing. He looked to be about my age, with a bit of a paunch. He was moving pretty slowly, so I have no idea what his overall level of fitness was. But he was wearing a white cotton t-shirt (I didn’t notice what it said, but it was just a plain old ordinary t-shirt, like we all wear all the time). It was drenched, and clinging to him. I’m sure he had to wring it out when he got home. He looked miserable.
The problem with that t-shirt was the cotton. Cotton doesn’t wick–it absorbs. If you sweat in a cotton shirt, that sweat just sits there in that shirt. Eventually (it doesn’t take long in this heat), the shirts fibers fill up with moisture, and as you keep sweating, there’s no way for your sweat to evaporate. The whole point of sweat is to cool you down–as the moisture forms on your skin, the surrounding air causes it to evaporate, which reduces your skin temperature (weather people call this process “evaporative cooling”).
But if you trap all that moisture under a layer of soggy, heavy cotton, your body can’t cool itself that way it was designed to. That’s where synthetic fibers come in. Athletic clothes are made from fabrics that are designed to augment the body’s cooling system. They wick the sweat away from your skin (meaning that the sweat is pulled off your skin, through the fabric, and then evaporates into the atmosphere).
Obviously, no fabric can keep up with the amount of sweat we produce in this kind of heat. But it really can help. When I came in from my run, my shirt was totally drenched–but it wasn’t clinging to me, and the skin under the shirt was actually marginally drier than my bare arms.
If you don’t like the way “athletic” clothes look, do some searching. It’s easy, nowadays, to find perfectly “normal” looking clothes made from high-performance fabrics (golfers, for instance, rarely look like gym-rats, but their clothes are just as technologically advanced as those of any other sport). It’s also possible to find athletic wear that won’t break the bank: Target sells a lot of workout clothes. I haven’t checked Wal-Mart, but there are inexpensive online retailers as well. We like Roadrunner Sports for clothes (as well as good deals on shoes).
If you search around, you’ll be able to find something that fits both your budget and your aesthetic. Just make sure it’s not cotton.