Sauna test

Yesterday I didn't feel up to training. I was so tired and felt a little run down. My foot has been OK, but a very quick sprint of about 250 metres to get to my car (wearing Reef sandals) probably wasn't the wisest move. I am, however, amazed to find I can run very fast when I have to!

So, I decided to have a sauna and thats all and therefore decided to test a few theories out. I weighed myself beforehand and took my pulse (which was 58, a bit higher than normal). I went into the sauna and at 15 minutes took my pulse again and noticed it had gone up to 79. By around 25 minutes I started to have that horrible panickly feeling I get when I feel like my heart is racing and I can't stand the heat anymore, so was surprised when it got to 30 minutes and the session was over and my pulse had only gone up to 114 bpm. Did I expect it to be higher? Well, I'm not sure... after all, it had doubled in the 30 minutes (which is one of the good things about the infrared sauna as it increases your heart rate to try and cope with the heat it is experiencing and therefore improves cardiovascular fitness.....apparently!).

The next surprise was weighing myself. I think it took somewhere between 10 - 12 minutes of the sauna session before I was noticably sweating, so I was very surprised to see that I had lost 1.4lbs in weight (which equates to 641ml). That is my sweat rate for around an hour running in cool conditions, so i was quite amazed by this.... and I haven't even covered my head during it yet... dread to think how difficult that will be to cope with!