Cool running: study finds it’s good for you
PULLING on your training gear can require monumental levels of motivation when temperatures take their first serious seasonal dip. Yet the Arctic weather forecast for parts of the UK over the next few weeks is good news for runners.
Trials commissioned by the Winter Run Series and conducted at the specialist heat labs at St Mary’s University, revealed that training on a typical British winter’s day (7-8C) is less of a physiological and psychological burden than running in the average temperature of a summer’s day (22.3C). Professor John Brewer, head of the School of Sport, Health and Applied Science at St Mary’s, recruited six trained male athletes to participate in the small study that required them to run 10km in 40 minutes on two different days and in the two different thermal environments.