Machka 

Cycling in humid Manitoba at those temps was great! I would be sweating enough for the breeze to cool me, and then I'd stop at lights or something, and the sweat would pour off me ... then I'd get going again and it would cool me.

Sometimes it would get hot enough to supplement the sweating by stopping in at a place with a public toilet and soaking my jersey and helmet pads under a tap.

Machka 

Yes!

I find that I'm a bit faster when it is quite warm ... we just arrived back in Tasmania (where it's the middle of winter) and went for a ride yesterday. My average speed dropped about 2 km/h from the averages I was putting out in Canada. Granted, I was probably tired and there's a bit more climbing here, but it just seems harder to get going in the cold.

StarBiker

Your muscles are more releaxed in warm weather. It will be great for this Thursday as the mid-atlantic sets records.
Of course you can get heat stroke, or at the very least heat cramps.

tandempower

I was working outside this morning and I realized that I could just rinse off without soap. Usually, I avoid showering more than once a day because it dries the skin, but a cold rinse-off when you're sweaty cools you down and freshens you just enough.

Wouldn't it be great if there were pull-string showers like at beaches everywhere so people could rinse off throughout the day? Of course they'd all have to wear wicking clothes that dried out fast.

Roody

It's the opposite for me, and I think this has as much to do with where you grew up as anything else. Also the attitude of parents--my mother hated hot weather, so did her mother, and I think it was passed on to me (culturally, not genetically, that is.)

I have gradually learned to tolerate and even enjoy the heat. What helped me to do this:

1. Weight loss
2. Not coddling myself with AC in the home
3. Using cognitive therapy techniques to reduce irrational beliefs and attitudes regarding weather
4. Forcing myself to go out and exercise in the heat

Roody

Cold air is denser than warm air, which results in more drag (air resistance) and thus slower speeds for the same level of effort.

Rollfast

When it's too hot people stay in and type a lot.

Rollfast

But you wanna pedal faster to get home.

tandempower

I'm glad to hear someone else shares my POV on this matter. Years ago I worshipped AC and planned my life around it. Now I am happily free to go outside whenever I want and coming inside feels like walking into the AC because it's always a bit cooler inside, even with the windows open, because the house insulation helps retain the morning temperature throughout the day. Well, it does warm up in the afternoon, but with fans it's like having a breeze while sitting in the shade, which is quite comfortable, and more so than AC imo since the indoor temps follow the outdoor ones with a few degrees difference. Now, whenever I spend time in a climate controlled building, it feels very sterile and artificial to me and when I go outside the effect is similar to leaving a matinee movie and being shocked by the brightness of the afternoon.

The analogy with the matinee is actually more accurate than you would think because pore dilation is similar to pupil dilation. Just as your pupils open up wide to take in the low light inside a movie theater, so do your pores open up to cool your body down when it's warm Often, you can sweat so lightly in a breeze that you don't even notice you're sweating. The only way you really even notice your pores are dilated is if you compare it to the feeling you have when you are not acclimated to the heat and you can feel your skin resisting relaxation and it's almost like you are clenching the heat inside instead of letting it out. This description may not be exactly physiologically accurate, but it's the best description I can muster.

So what are your cognitive therapy techniques for dealing with heat? I embrace it as a kind of meditation, or incubation really. I take walks in the heat sometimes where I take a very slow pace with almost no exertion and just sort of float through the warm air, almost in a daze. This probably sounds weird, but it is just a different way of tuning your body. If it cools down for whatever reason, because of rain or shade for example, I feel myself snap into more alertness and my walking speeds up as the muscle-twitch capacity increases. But I've learned to just accept the semi-drowsy 'daze' of walking in the heat as an MO in and of itself. Idk if walking around in such a state would put some people at a higher risk of heat stroke, but I don't feel like that's a risk; since I don't get anything like nausea or headaches.

StarBiker

And don't make much sense in the process, and argue?

StarBiker

tandempower

What's funny, exactly?

Walter S

Some years back I used to do ALL of my riding in the summer time in the early morning, leaving the house well before dawn and returning only shortly after sunrise. As a result I was acclimated to temperatures like 85F instead of 98F. The difference is huge.

I used to commute to work, riding to the office but then riding the train home. Then as my "bicycle problem" grew, and by the time I became carfree, I was riding home in the afternoon on my bicycle too. After doing this for a while I began to want less air conditioning in my house. If the thermostat was on 76F I was freezing, whereas that had been a pretty ideal setting before.

I usually set the AC around 82F now. And operate it much cheaper.

StarBiker

^
It would be hot as hell in here. Sleeping in 80 Degrees? That's what It would be in the upstairs.

This works if you live in a rancher in a more rural area. And it depends on the person. I hate anything in the 80's up. Unless very dry. 80 and a 35 degree dewpoint is nice.

Yeah, 98 degrees is a big difference from 85. Especially when the dewpoint is 70. Being in Atlanta you should know this.

Whole lotta asphalt around here.

jon c. 

I'm the same way. If it was 76 in the house, I'd be going outside to warm up. We always try to find restaurants with outdoor seating as they tend to be too cold inside.

Machka 

We try to keep the temperature at least 15C (59F) in the house all night and most of the day during the winters here ... and 21C (70F) during the evenings.

It gets up to 24C (75F) at work, and that is stifling for sitting around in an office.

In the summer we just let the temperature be whatever it will be ... unless it happens to be a rare hot day. Then we'll turn the A/C on for a little while.


And these days I can roast ... absolutely dripping sweat ... at any temperature.

StarBiker

I have a hard to believing people turning off the AC from the mid atlantic south in the summer. Wednesday through Monday it's suppose to be in the mid 90's. And high dewpoints. This is the kind of weather that can kill people indoors without AC.

I-Like-To-Bike

Some people are masochists or ascetics, or both.

Walter S

You won't find me turning it off. I just managed to twist the temp dial a little differently. And even then it was for my personal comfort. There's not much crazier than paying money to be cold.

tandempower

Exactly my experience. The difference between biking/walking in the sun or shade is also huge.

It is around 84F now and it feels a bit warm, but with the fan on it's comfortable and I'm not sweating. I'm not uncomfortable when I stay someplace where the AC is set to 82F, but I prefer to leave the windows open and allow the temperature to rise and fall naturally. I find it really fascinating to come inside from outside and see what the indoor temp is relative to the outside, since they're almost always different without doing anything to create the difference.

That's the funny thing. People aren't cold. They acclimate themselves to the lower temperatures by always nudging it down a degree further when they feel hot for whatever reason. They basically put themselves through the natural acclimatization the body goes through in the transition between summer and winter, but by the time it starts getting cold in fall, they start with the opposite process with the heating.

SHBR

Unprecedented heatwave here.

41C outside, and the A/C is set at 30C, and is just barely keeping up.

Luckily, I don't have anything too urgent to do during the day.

Roody

If it was regularly that hot here, I would install the AC. But we typically get over 90 only an average of 10 days a year. By the time I make up my mind to install the AC, the forecast is for lower heat and humidity.

Your statement about heat killing people is literally true. But these are usually elderly people or those with serious medical conditions. Most of us can live through very hot weather without dying, especially if we use some common sense about lifestyle and housing styles. Billions of people live near the equator, after all. They acclimate to the heat and their buildings are often designed to facilitate natural ventilation and cooling. They also make cultural adaptations such as staying up late at night and resting during the heat of the day.

Roody

This is kinda crazy IMO. I have a relative who sets the thermostat at 70 in the summer and 76 in the winter! She swears that's the only way she can be comfortable. I am much more comfortable when I acclimate as much as possible to the outdoor temperature. At the very least, I would prefer the 76 in the summer and the 70 in winter.

tandempower

I think you mentioned something about cognitive tricks to get yourself to adapt to the heat a few posts back. I notice a lot of cognitive patterns that affect how we perceive temperature. I notice, for example, that the preference for heating and cooling are related to a more general attitude toward natural states as something to be transcended. It's like the feeling of being safer the further up off the ground you are, or the further you are from the edge of a forest. So some people feel better when they're getting more medical therapy, taking medicine or having surgery, because it makes them feel like something is being done to change their natural state, which they subconsciously/cognitively perceive as inferior to a state of artificial intervention as superior. This is cognitively relative, because you can also have a perspective like mine (and others) where you view natural organic processes as being more evolved than artificial mechanical procedures that humans do, so I'd much rather have my body functioning naturally than to be taking medicine or having surgeries, etc.; though I know there are situations where those artificial interventions are necessary because your bodily health is so compromised by infection or trauma that it's not going to be able to heal on its own, or if it does it will heal in a deformed way.

Anyway, I try to utilize this cognitive preference for artificial interventions by telling people to think of the natural temperature in terms of the corresponding artificial version of it. E.g. you can think of summer heat as abundant free winter heating, as if you had a heater so powerful you could blow enough heat outdoors to raise the temperature up into the 80s or 90s or whatever it is. You can think of it like those hand-dryers that blow hot air, but on a huge scale. This probably wouldn't appeal to people much, but it sort of creates the cognitive sense that the natural seasonal heat is a temporary thing that's going to blow away to reveal the winter cold lurking behind it soon enough. It puts a different perspective on summer heat to think of it as temporarily free heat and 'get it while you can!'

I tell people the same thing about winter cold in the south where a lot of people are really pathetic when it comes to acclimating to the cold. Some people on this forum laugh at me when I say I wear a ski mask when it's in the 20sF, but I am probably one of the toughest people in my area in this regard. A lot of people have the heat on as soon as the outdoor temp drops into the 60s, which I find ridiculous. All summer they were paying an arm and a leg and depleting planetary energy reserves to refrigerate their houses, and suddenly the moment the heat is gone, they miss it and want to replace it with artificial heat. They'll complain about the cold and I'll remind them how they long for it during the heat of summer. Cognitively, you think about the natural temperature differently when you frame it in terms of some other season when you were longing for the time of year that you're farthest away from in the seasonal cycle. I guess that's just a way of saying the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

Machka 

For the most part ... I just simply dress for the conditions, take the necessary precautions for the conditions, and deal with it.

I've cycled in temps as low as -40C and higher than +40C ... it's all doable.