Maybe I do. I read 87 degrees in the Lehigh parking lot at 2:00pm. When I say slight breeze, it was because I felt it.
Maybe I do. I read 87 degrees in the Lehigh parking lot at 2:00pm. When I say slight breeze, it was because I felt it.
You also have to consider that this is a huge meet. Every race has 300-400 people in it, and it is very packed in for that first mile+. All of those bodies packed together definitely does not help with heat.
I was working as an assistant coach for a team that ran in both brown races. The poster that said it was a warzone was how I described it to my friends after I got home. I believe 6 people from my 22 person team ended up in the medical tent with ice bags (which were at a premium) on their necks and under their arms, incoherent for 10-30 minutes depending on the severity. Ambulances were everywhere and the medical staff was definitely overwhelmed. They were unprepared because no one expected the consequences. I don't know if this has ever happened at this meet.
I also ran the course 2x before the meet to get my run in. At 9:30 it was sunny and humid, but definitely runnable. However, running through the cornfields that make up a lot of the course was weirdly hot and humid. The air can't circulate in there and it just bakes. Like malmo said if anyone had taken weather data from places actually on the course it would have been worse than was indicated by all the data that people have looked at when making judgments. The reality is that the local medical staff was overrun by people from the meet and had no choice but to stem the flow of heat exhausted runners or risk something really bad happening to someone.
It was the humidity.
Excellent post, malmo.
sandybeaver wrote:
I also ran the course 2x before the meet to get my run in. At 9:30 it was sunny and humid, but definitely runnable. However, running through the cornfields that make up a lot of the course was weirdly hot and humid. The air can't circulate in there and it just bakes. Like malmo said if anyone had taken weather data from places actually on the course it would have been worse than was indicated by all the data that people have looked at when making judgments.
I completely missed the part about the cornfields. It wasn't "weirdly humid," it is exactly what is expected in a cornfield. Farmers and scientists have known for a long time the phenomenon of intense humidity in cornfields. One of the properties of corn is that it emits a lot of moisture through respiration. The surface area of an acre of corn is a lot greater than the ground in which it's planted. Corn put a huge amount of moisture into the local atmosphere, making ground level dew points shoot through the roof (where the ambient recorded temperatures are at it's highest). The higher the temperature the more moisture the air can accept if it's available. The deadly cocktail of direct overhead sun and supercharged local dew points driven by the cornfield effect made conditions for cross country competition horrible.
From a broader perspective, parts of the country that are known for corn production are also known for extremely high dew points during the Summer months. On a previous thread, Brian Erb correctly stated that his experience was that Omaha was much more humid than Atlanta because of it -- and the data backed it up -- Omaha's historic record showed that it had three times as many 75°+ dew point days than Atlanta had.
http://tinyurl.com/Cornfield-effectMalmo: Great post. See reading Lets Run can be educational. I was there and it was a weird sight of seeing so many runners collapsing yet a lot of runners running really well. I still feel like the host of the meet let the runners down by not doing anything different then previous years. There should be no debate in shutting the race down.