The Moveee team
Free coaching · a real route for every ride
Heat is the most under-respected variable in amateur racing. Riders will rebuild a training plan over a 3% difference in threshold power, then ride a 34°C event with the same pacing plan they used in April and wonder why the last hour was a catastrophe.
Hot conditions do not just make riding less pleasant. They change what your body can do, they change the correct pacing, and at the far end they become a medical problem rather than a performance one.
What heat actually does to you
Working muscles produce a great deal of heat, and shedding it means moving blood to the skin. That blood is not available to the muscles at the same time — so the same power costs more heart rate, and the cardiac output available for propulsion falls. This is the mechanism behind the drift described in aerobic decoupling, and in real heat it is dramatic.
Sweating carries heat away, but only while there is fluid to sweat and air dry enough to evaporate it. Humidity is the hidden killer here: 30°C at 80% humidity is far harder than 35°C in dry air, because evaporation — the actual cooling mechanism — is blocked.
Pace differently, on purpose
The single most valuable adjustment is also the least popular: ride the first half slower than your plan says. In heat, a rider who goes out on their normal number does not simply fade — they can reach a point where continuing at any pace becomes impossible.
Take your usual target and drop it. How much depends on the conditions and on how well heat-adapted you are, but starting 5–10% below your temperate-weather number on a genuinely hot day is a reasonable bet, with the option to lift it in the last third if you feel strong. That last clause matters: a plan that lets you speed up when things go well is much easier to stick to than one that only ever takes away.
Heart rate becomes a poor pacing guide in heat, because it is elevated by the cooling demand rather than by the work. Power is the more honest instrument, and perceived effort — despite everything said above about the first hour — is a genuinely useful third input when it is very hot. Gran fondo pacing with power is the temperate-weather version of this plan.
Cooling strategies, ranked honestly
| When | What | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|
| Before the start | Cold drinks and ice slurry Pre-cooling genuinely works — arriving at the start line with a lower core temperature buys you time before heat becomes the limiter. An icy drink in the last 30 minutes is the simplest version. |
High |
| Before the start | Shade, and a short warm-up A full 30-minute warm-up in 35°C costs more than it buys. Shorten it, do it in shade, and accept a slightly slower first ten minutes. |
High |
| During | Water over your head and neck Mostly a perceptual benefit rather than a large change in core temperature — but perception matters, and a rider who feels less cooked rides better. |
Moderate |
| During | Ice in a sock down the jersey Crude, effective, and standard practice in hot professional races for a reason. Neck and upper back are the usual spots. |
Moderate |
| During | Drinking to a schedule The largest controllable factor. Thirst lags badly in heat, and in a race you will not remember to drink unless you have decided in advance when. |
High |
| After | Get cool before you get comfortable Shade, cold drink, wet towel, before sitting down in the sun with a coffee. Recovery from a hot race starts with getting your core temperature down. |
High |
Acclimatise, if you have two weeks
Heat adaptation is one of the more reliable adaptations in endurance sport, and it happens faster than most training adaptations — a week to ten days of regular heat exposure produces meaningful changes in plasma volume and sweat response. It also fades quickly once you stop.
The practical implication for a rider with a hot event abroad: the fortnight before is when the work happens, not the month. Heat training for cyclists covers protocols in detail — including the indoor version, which is how most riders in a northern climate can prepare for a July event in southern Europe at all.
Drinking and salt
Everything in sweat testing and sodium applies double here. Know your own sweat rate rather than guessing, put sodium in the bottle, and plan where you will refill — a hot event where you run out of fluid at 60 km is not recoverable by anything you do afterwards.
One easy win: cold fluid is both better tolerated and more effective at pulling heat out than warm fluid. Frozen bottles that thaw as you ride are a simple, free improvement over two bottles that are at air temperature by the first feed zone.
Stop immediately if any of these appear
- Stopping sweating, or skin that has gone dry and hot
- Confusion, slurred speech, or unusual aggression
- Dizziness, nausea or vomiting that does not settle when you stop
- Goosebumps or chills in genuine heat
These are signs of heat illness, not of being tired, and they can escalate fast. Get into shade, get cool, get fluid, and get help. There is no result worth continuing for, and the rider experiencing it is frequently the worst-placed person to judge — if you see this in someone else, intervene.
Practising heat indoors
Riders in cool climates have an obvious problem: you cannot rehearse for 35°C in a Slovenian April. The workaround is the room. A trainer session with the fan off and the door closed produces a genuinely hot environment, and it is the standard way of building heat adaptation without travelling.
Treat those sessions with respect — they are harder than they look, the power targets should be modest, and they are not the place to also chase intervals. Moveee Indoor will hold a steady low target for as long as you want in a browser tab, which is exactly what a heat session asks for, and the saved ride shows the heart-rate drift so you can watch your adaptation arrive across the fortnight.
The mindset that works
In a hot race, everybody is suffering. The rider who finishes well is rarely the one who tolerated the heat best by willpower — it is the one who accepted early that today was a slower day, rode accordingly, drank on schedule, and still had something left when half the field had nothing. That is not a compromise. On a hot day, it is the race.
Sources 7
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Racinais S, Alonso JM, Coutts AJ, et al. Consensus recommendations on training and competing in the heat · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2015
- 2 Périard JD, Racinais S, Sawka MN Adaptations and mechanisms of human heat acclimation: applications for competitive athletes and sports · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2015
- 3 Bongers CCWG, Thijssen DHJ, Veltmeijer MTW, Hopman MTE, Eijsvogels TMH Precooling and percooling (cooling during exercise) both improve performance in the heat: a meta-analytical review · British Journal of Sports Medicine · 2015
- 4 Tucker R, Rauch L, Harley YXR, Noakes TD Impaired exercise performance in the heat is associated with an anticipatory reduction in skeletal muscle recruitment · Pflügers Archiv · 2004
- 5 Maughan RJ, Otani H, Watson P Influence of relative humidity on prolonged exercise capacity in a warm environment · European Journal of Applied Physiology · 2012
- 6 Burdon CA, O'Connor HT, Gifford JA, Shirreffs SM Influence of beverage temperature on exercise performance in the heat: a systematic review · International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism · 2010
- 7 Armstrong LE, Casa DJ, Millard-Stafford M, et al. Exertional heat illness during training and competition (ACSM position stand) · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2007
Plan backwards from your event
Give Moveee your event date and it works back from it — the long rides where they belong, the sharpening in the right week, and a taper that arrives on time. It adapts when you miss a session, because you will.
Plan my eventKeep reading
Ultra-distance racing: sleep, pacing and the first 24 hours
Past about a day, the limiter stops being your legs. Sleep strategy and what deprivation actually costs you, pacing far below threshold, and the saddle and nerve problems that end more ultras than fitness ever does.
How to pace a time trial with power
The first two minutes decide most time trials, and usually badly. How to pick a target, why even pacing wins on flat courses but not hilly ones, and how to spend your energy above threshold deliberately.
Hill climb events: eight minutes of honesty
One road, one clock, nowhere to hide — and the one event where power-to-weight genuinely dominates. Pacing by duration, what is worth stripping off the bike and what absolutely is not, and the warm-up mistake half the field makes.
Pre-race openers: the day-before session that wakes your legs up
Complete rest the day before an event often leaves you feeling flat. What an opener session does, what it should look like, and how long before the start it's worth doing.
How to taper for a big ride: the last two weeks
The event is booked and the training is done — the last two weeks are where riders either bank their fitness or quietly throw it away. Drop the volume, keep the intensity, and follow a day-by-day fortnight that arrives at the start line fresh instead of flat.
Racing abroad: six things that are not like home
The riding is the familiar part. Licences, race manuals, bunch culture, terrain you cannot rehearse, heat and altitude — and the alpine descent that riders underestimate far more often than the climb.
Racing on consecutive days: how to recover between stages
The refuelling rules you can safely ignore in a normal training week become the whole game when you race again in eighteen hours. Glycogen arithmetic, what sleep is worth, and which recovery gadgets survive contact with the evidence.
The warm-up, matched to the ride you're about to do
The shorter and harder the effort, the longer the warm-up — and vice versa. Four protocols, from a 10-minute roll-out to a full pre-race routine, plus what to stop doing beforehand.
Pacing a gran fondo with power: the first climb is the trap
The purest pacing test in amateur cycling. Target bands by event length, the four rules that decide the day, and why the number that ruins fondos is almost never the average.
Cornering under pressure: the racing lines nobody practises
A bad corner costs you twice: once in it, again on the exit. The physics of lean and grip, where to look, how to countersteer on purpose, and the race-day corners you can only learn by doing.
How to train for your first gran fondo (a 12-week plan you can actually follow)
A gran fondo is a long day in the saddle — but it's very doable with the right build. Here's a realistic 12-week plan, the key workouts, and how to pace and fuel the big day.
How to plan a 200 km ride (and finish it)
Two hundred kilometres is a fuelling and pacing problem long before it's a fitness one. Target intensity, carbohydrate per hour over eight hours, where to put the climbs, and where to plan the resupply.