The Human Potential Running Series Podcast · John Lacroix

HPRS Podcast - Episode 70: Thermoregulation at Endurance Events

·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

At Never Summer 100K, a creek crossing dropped Storms into a cold spiral that ended her race at mile 58.

The episode opens in the office with candy, lollipops, Smarties, lemon drops, and the kind of easy pre show talk that sounds like people settling in before the real conversation starts. John keeps things loose, and grounds the room with a pre recording walk, a backyard peach, and a mini watermelon. He brings Storms into the center of the conversation and asks about the Most Awesome Amazing Nurses Award. The tone stays friendly and very much in the room. From there, the talk moves toward endurance event physiology and how the body behaves when conditions get unfriendly. The conversation lands on thermoregulation, but it does not stay in classroom mode for long. It moves through real examples, real preferences, and real discomfort. Cold is a major theme. So is heat. So is the awkward middle ground people use for recovery, adaptation, or just getting through the day. A key point comes from Never Summer, where dry mouth made it hard to eat solids. John and Storms talk through how high altitude can leave someone without enough saliva to chew, swallow, and keep food down. That turns into more than a side note. It becomes a practical endurance problem. If you cannot process food, your fuel plan gets shaky fast. The discussion treats that as a real performance factor, not an abstract one. The episode also leans into the personal side of temperature tolerance. One person is clearly a hot shower person, and not just mildly hot. Very hot. The kind of hot that gets close to scalding if you let it go too far. Cold plunges and cold showers are treated as close to a nightmare, which gives the conversation a blunt, funny edge. That contrast matters because it shows how thermoregulation is not one clean rule but a messy, individual thing. The show then gets interested in the possibility of using temperature changes as a kind of exposure therapy. Not a full cold plunge. Something more like moving from hot to tepid to cool, or ending a shower by dropping the temperature after starting hot. The idea is to work on the autonomic nervous system, or at least see whether a controlled shift can help the body handle stress better. The tone stays curious rather than preachy. Nobody acts like the answer is settled. There is also a strong sense of race calendar reality in the back half of the episode. Sanger comes up as the next test case, and the weather there sounds like its own game. Cold is expected, but some valleys are even colder. During the day it can swing from perfect to a little too hot depending on the clouds. That makes the thermoregulation talk feel timely rather than theoretical. It is about what people will actually face soon. The conversation never really leaves the trail community. Even when it gets into body systems, it stays rooted in the lived habits of runners, the weird tolerances people build, and the small details that matter when you are out there a long time. The result is less like a polished seminar and more like a working conversation among people who have been through enough races to know that temperature can ruin a day or save one. It is practical, a little messy, and honest about how hard it is to generalize from one body to another. The episode keeps a warm, familiar rhythm. It moves from personal preference to race logistics, then back to bodily stress and adaptation, then out again to the next event on the calendar. That back and forth is part of the show's shape. It does not rush to clean conclusions. It lets the topic breathe a little. It lets people say what they actually do, what they actually feel, and where the evidence seems mixed. By the end, the episode feels like a real endurance community check in about survival, comfort, and adaptation. It is about what happens when the body gets too dry, too cold, too hot, or just pushed past its easy range. It is also about the familiar HPRS habit of starting with a room full of small talk and ending with something useful for the next race day. The final note is not certainty. It is experimentation. They will put some of it to the test soon enough.

As heard by us

A practical, lived-in talk about how heat, cold, and altitude affect endurance bodies.

Episode 70 stays close to the trail and to the body. It moves from dry mouth at altitude and trouble getting solids down to hot showers, cold exposure, and the odd in between.

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Why you'd press play

You want practical advice on staying functional when cold, heat, and altitude start messing with your body.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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