A part of outdoor sports is that you must deal with the weather, which is a challenge when it’s really hot and you have to run as fast as you can for a couple of hours. Bloomberg illustrates the challenges and how athletes might cope:
The harder the human body works, the hotter it gets. Roughly 80% of the energy generated by performing muscular exercises is released as heat, according to Mike Sawka, an environmental physiologist and professor at Georgia Tech. When external temperatures are cool, it’s easy for the body to dissipate that heat through thermal radiation and sweat. But when temperatures soar, and especially when it’s humid, the body struggles to keep up.
There’s a section that shows triathlete Kristian Blummenfelt’s core temperature against his skin temperature with two line charts during a race. Coupled with the annotation, the charts work well to show the attempts at keeping his body cool and the eventual heat stroke as his body hits its limit.
Tags: Bloomberg, heat, Kristian Blummenfelt, Olympics, sports