On heat conditioning/acclimatization

Long story short, my current employment path means I'll be spending a solid amount of time in very hot conditions in the outdoors with a strict requirement for long sleeves, pants, and headwear. There is no air-conditioning escape route. It is demanding physical labor living in the outdoors full time. I don't know anyone specifically on the forum who has a similar line of work, but I do know that many of you ride throughout the summer in hot conditions and some of you work with hot metal indoors (meaning I assume you wear sleeves and headwear and that it is hot). I am thus appealing to the wisdom of the Salon for any tried and true tips or protocols for heat conditioning/acclimatization. Sauna time? Changing up sleep clothing routines? What have I not thought of outside of the obvious (go do hard work in the hottest hours of the day)?

It's been a particularly cool and wet spring in the valley where I live, so simply working hard outdoors in heavy clothes has been good but not as challenging as it would have been last year, when it hit 108f this week. I live mostly outdoors anyways, and we don't have any form of climate control in our home, so I can't just crank up the heat and do jumping jacks. Surely this subject is relevant for anyone who spends summers doing sports in a warming climate, so hopefully my OT-ishness is permissible...

I have done heat training from an athletic point of view and had success with it, so would guess that it would translate well. 2 ways of going about:

1. Heat exposure after you are already hot. After a ride, workout, outside work in hot conditions, go into a sauna or hot bath. Start with 5-10s and gradually build up. Drink - this isn't dehydration training, just heat training.
2. Do a ride, workout, outside work in warm conditions and wear extra clothing to simulate additional warmth. Key here is that you shouldn't be killing yourself as far as work rate. If you are familiar with cycling lingo, this is a zone 1 ride. You want to build up internal temp and let it sit there. Not build it up until you combust. Again, drink.

Would guess that these types of techniques would be good for any type of heat adaptation.

Heat acclimation described in item 2 mentioned above is recommended. Putter along on a really hot day (with enough cold water), but just let your body soak up the heat. It's how I would prepare for warm and humid conditions back when I raced on the road.

Other things to consider. Would you be allowed a cooler filled with ice? If so, water bottles that 1/3-filled with frozen water will come in quite handy. There are also cooling vests with phase-change cooling inserts. Those probably have to be replaced every hour, but it should make things a bit more bearable.

I've done a bunch of deployments in the Persian Gulf region on ships. As an engineer, I spent most of my time in the steam plant where general ambient temps would be around 120 degrees with areas around the turbines at 150. Moving air is your friend, so are coveralls. Coveralls minimize the layers of material to dissipate heat and you can get materials that quickly evaporate. If possible, avoid cotton undergarments. Although I generally despise boxer briefs, they work well in hot temps and help prevent prickly heat. Neck wraps for evaporative cooling and if you're in a hardhat, a broad brim version is desired. If you're in a hardhat, pro tip, unscented panty liners work well on the sweatband. Stick it on and when it gets too dirty, just peel and replace.

Are you handling hot/dirty/dangerous materials as well and are gloves, eye protection and a respirator required? I ask as I spent 5 years working outside in a mill environment and the equipment that I wore there was pretty intense and we were exposed to Mother Nature 12 months a year. Summers were always the worst, in terms of high temperatures, humidity and rain and what I'd recommend in terms of clothing, protection and hydration, might be different from what you'd need.

https://www.acmecoke.com/acme-coke-c...dman-training/

https://youtu.be/Qp74euzqVA0

I will throw this out here for anyone that has seen a road crew laying asphalt in Phoenix when it is 110 degrees. Long sleeve light colored shirts, large large brim hats.

Everyone is a little different so you just have to listen to your own body and when you get rest in the shade, rest in the shade.

I'd tell you to go sit in a sauna for 1 hr. I have a 80 C sauna that I will do 30 minutes. It makes riding in high temp easy.

Thank you all for the nice suggestions. An extra layer is a good idea, and it's finally heating up here so perhaps it will be an easier adaptation period. Work starts when the fires start, so I've probably got another few weeks or a month to continue adapting.

To answer the questions: No, no ice-box cache allowed. No choice of clothing. Yes to PPE (gloves, helmet, eyepro). @bigbill cotton is already out from a personal preference and synthetics are a no-go, so it's all wool. I already wear a neck bandana at all times so that helps with the wicking/evaporation. I rarely get dehydrated as I am a pretty aggressive drinker. My neighbor upriver a bit has a sauna, so I'll poke him to end some rides or runs there, or just walk over after an afternoon of hoeing, digging, or splitting wood around the homestead. @echappist and @KonaSS, most of my riding and running is Z2 anyways and I do a 3.5-4mi dog walk on the lake every day in the afternoon which is definitely Z1 - I already ruck when I do the latter, a backpack with a couple of 25# plates in it, but keeping on my hoodie may be the ticket to heat. Honestly, I'm pretty well heat adapted already just from working outdoors quite a bit; my query was mostly what people do as a specific protocol/effort to increase heat adaptation - and y'all delivered as usual.

Aside from layers and the sauna, is there any trick to preparing the body for prolonged heat exposure?

Forest Service fire fighter?

I know that OSHA has strict guidelines for firefighting undergarments and coverings. We used to wear cotton long underwear under the heat resistant cotton clothing especially in the Summer, because it wouldn’t catch fire or melt and when you sweat, it stayed damp. Wool in the Fall through Spring. They distributed salt pills and salt gels and lots of water to us, but that was before sports drinks. I’d have to believe that your employer and colleagues have some field tips. Be careful out there.

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Originally Posted by j44ke

Forest Service fire fighter?

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Yes sir. FFT2 hand crew working the west coast (OR, CA, WA, and ID).

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Originally Posted by rwsaunders

I know that OSHA has strict guidelines for firefighting undergarments and coverings. We used to wear cotton long underwear under the heat resistant cotton clothing especially in the Summer, because it wouldn’t catch fire or melt and when you sweat, it stayed damp. Wool in the Fall through Spring. They distributed salt pills and salt gels and lots of water to us, but that was before sports drinks. I’d have to believe that your employer and colleagues have some field tips. Be careful out there.

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Last season I drank about 100 gallons of Gatorade and infinitely more water than I'd known was possible. It took two full runs (14 day deployments) to feel like I was heat-adapted. I was hoping to get a headstart this year. My colleagues are largely of the "tough it out and you'll get there" opinion, which is the bike-world equivalent of "racing into shape" by doing a bunch of miserable early crits to get into shape for the end of the season. I've always preferred adequate preparation over fake-it-till-you-make-it.

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Originally Posted by Octave

Yes sir. FFT2 hand crew working the west coast (OR, CA, WA, and ID)....

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Every year in AZ I would have a couple students who worked as fire fighters. Some in Arizona but also surrounding states. They used the money to help pay for school. Seemed like their training was hiking up local mountains with weighted packs, drinking a lot of beer, and then hiking back down with somewhat lighter weighted packs. They were all 18-20 years old though, so YMMV.

They were admirably serious about the job though. Definitely was building some character.

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Originally Posted by Octave

Yes sir. FFT2 hand crew working the west coast (OR, CA, WA, and ID).

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Are you going to be working out of McKenzie Bridge? My boy David is on a hand crew based out of there, but they are currently on loan to BLM and the Ute tribe outside Durango.

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Originally Posted by j44ke

Every year in AZ I would have a couple students who worked as fire fighters. Some in Arizona but also surrounding states. They used the money to help pay for school. Seemed like their training was hiking up local mountains with weighted packs, drinking a lot of beer, and then hiking back down with somewhat lighter weighted packs. They were all 18-20 years old though, so YMMV.

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I'm 34 but my technique is not that different. I'm in Oregon so I probably drink better beer, though.

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Originally Posted by lumpy

Are you going to be working out of McKenzie Bridge? My boy David is on a hand crew based out of there, but they are currently on loan to BLM and the Ute tribe outside Durango.

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I live relatively close to there, about 30 miles south on the edge of the Umpqua National Forest. Our crew dispatches from Eugene, OR. Godspeed to your boy. Durango is nice.

No guidance on what to wear but in '68 Dad would run out-and-backs along the air strip in Redmond, with a full pack, in his smoke jumper boots. I hope you find better techniques. Take care of yourself out there.

Here's a conversation between to coworkers from back when I worked in New Mexico.
Coworker 1: Are you going to get red carded this year?
Coworker 2: No I'm going to work all the overtime when you guys get deployed to a fire and sleep in an air conditioned bed.
I learned a lot that day, I really like beds and AC.

I don't understand the OSHA rules on undergarments. If they melt you're already fucked. I have gotten "sunburn" through my SCBA mask in black smoke. It was fucking hot. My synthetic drawers were fine.

I don't have any hot weather training advice and I'm not sure you know this but making sure your gear is broken in a comfortable will probably make you happier than being used to the heat.

Good luck Octave, wildland is a much different beast than structure and I respect the long days you guys work.

Well the planet decided to deliver and we'll be seeing close to or above 90F this weekend.

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Originally Posted by rec head

Here's a conversation between to coworkers from back when I worked in New Mexico.
Coworker 1: Are you going to get red carded this year?
Coworker 2: No I'm going to work all the overtime when you guys get deployed to a fire and sleep in an air conditioned bed.
I learned a lot that day, I really like beds and AC.

I don't understand the OSHA rules on undergarments. If they melt you're already fucked. I have gotten "sunburn" through my SCBA mask in black smoke. It was fucking hot. My synthetic drawers were fine.

I don't have any hot weather training advice and I'm not sure you know this but making sure your gear is broken in a comfortable will probably make you happier than being used to the heat.

Good luck Octave, wildland is a much different beast than structure and I respect the long days you guys work.

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Ha! I've never owned air conditioning, even when I lived in Marseille for 5 years. Adaptation is the game to play. As for beds, I do prefer those.

My understanding re: the OSHA rules on garments melting is the ability to deal with and clean burns properly. It's not about a risk that the garment is going to spontaneously melt on the fireline, but that the wound will have a bunch of melted synthetic material in it when it comes time to clean and treat it, which is a mess I'd be loathe to deal with as an EMT..

I'm wearing last year's boots (Danner Super Rainforest), which are well broken in by now. The rest of my gear is either new (t-shirts/underpants) or already broken in (tent, gloves..etc).

Thanks for the well wishes. The hours are rough, but the work is needed, now more than ever.

Not to derail, however at one time you were working in a lab, there were some interesting in-depth comments on CBD. Tired of lab life? Seems like your place in OR is quite envious. Just curious, if you care to share, about your life changes. Or, excuse me for intruding, not anything other than curiosity.

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Originally Posted by Clyde

Not to derail, however at one time you were working in a lab, there were some interesting in-depth comments on CBD. Tired of lab life? Seems like your place in OR is quite envious. Just curious, if you care to share, about your life changes. Or, excuse me for intruding, not anything other than curiosity.

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I don't have a lot of outlets to spill these days, and my wife is tired of hearing me blather on, so I'll play -

I finished my PhD in neuroscience in 2014, working on the neuroscientific basis of cocaine addiction in a lab outside of North Chicago. From there, I moved to Marseille, FR, to work in a lab studying cannabinoid exposure during development (pregnancy and postnatal THC and CBD). I lived there for 5 years doing that work. In my 4th year there we had a wildfire tear through the national park, at the edge of which my lab was located. I watched the places I rode every day burn to ashes and black and the smell never left my desk, even a year later. I knew from that moment that my "Plan B" was to fight forest fires.

I spent my entire childhood, adolescence, and every spare moment I had during college, graduate school, and the rest of my adult life escaping to the forest. I canoed the length of Manitoba alone at 16, hiked 28 days across Denali at 17, bikepacked the Colorado Trail before starting graduate school, and have spent nearly every morning and weekend exploring the forest for the entirety of my adulthood. This whole time I've expected someone else to protect the places I loved so much, the lungs of our planet, the rich and diverse stream from which all of the biodiversity we need so much arises. It wasn't until I watched it burn before my eyes, and fell to my knees helpless, that I realized that it even needed to be protected in this way. Sure, I'd protested old growth loggers in college in Southern California, heck I even spent a summer during college living in a forest to ostensibly stop bulldozers. But watching it all burn in a matter of days while local resources were tied up elsewhere made me realize that it was boots in the black that kept the world intact.

After living in France for 5 years I grew tired and skeptical of the lab life. Everything I was doing was so protracted - I was studying mechanistic neuroscientific underpinnings of developmental disorders in the hope that someone, someday, might use that "basic research" as a prompt to develop a therapy to help someone. It was "doing good" but N degrees removed from the "good." The moment that this really hit me was seeing a drug I had worked on as an intern during college go into Phase III trials a whopping 10 years after I had assisted in the Phase I trials (MDMA for the treatment of PTSD). If it took 10 years to get from Phase I to Phase III (and we still await an actual approval for the many people who continue to suffer), what did that mean for the work I did on novel molecules that wouldn't even see a preclinical pharmaceutical trial in rodents for years? So I took a job working as a full-time scientific writer for a biopharmaceutical company developing cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals. I took the job while living in France, essentially telecommuting to North America in the evenings when my lab work was finished; work at the lab bench as an electrophysiologist from morning until night, then log on while the Canadians were making morning coffee and work through the evening. It continued like that for 4 months while I buttoned up the loose ends at my lab job, completed ongoing projects, trained a replacement.

Comfortable with my new position, we bought a homestead in Oregon and left France. As it turns out (detailed somewhere else on this forum, I believe), we'd be leaving within days of the international border closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We spent our last weeks in France under lockdown (the real one, not the American suggestion-type) before arriving here in Oregon on April 1st, 2020. Since then, I have continued to work as a scientific writer in the biopharmaceutical world developing and applying for the approval of various drugs. It is one step less removed from "doing good" than working in a lab, but a few years in I can see how far removed it still is. The summer of 2020 was rough for fires here in the PNW. Our homestead was shrouded in smoke for a month. Our August crops failed as they were choked out by the lack of light. We spent two weeks without power, cranking our hand-powered radio to check for evacuation notices, canning cherries for our go-bags and painting our sheep so we could find them in the thick smoke. Once again, I was faced with the reality of the fragility of our forests.

That brings me to the summer of 2021, when I took a leave of absence from my job for a couple of months to train, obtain certifications, and deploy as a wildland firefighter. It was a calmer year, and the COVID-19 surge didn't make anything easier. In the end I spent most of that time training and was only briefly deployed. But I was hooked. It was zero steps removed from "doing good." It saved forests. It saved homes. I didn't get to kiss any babies and I didn't get the key to the city, but I slept well knowing what I'd done and I didn't have to look at a computer screen writing about cancer patients and COVID for a couple of months. After another year of work, spending my waking hours split between homesteading and writing/reading about drugs and disease, I decided to complete the shift. I am still doing contract work as a now-seasoned writer for pharmaceutical development, helping to prepare application packages for drugs in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In the meantime, I have obtained additional certifications and training (bzzz bzzz goes the saw, vroom vroom goes the truck, and I don't know what sound an EMT makes other than "phew") to progress as a wildland firefighter, and broken in my boots. This year I am all in. The forests will continue to burn, and the season will only get longer, and while I can't stop the systemic destruction of our environment I can help with the today and tomorrow of the reality we all have to live with right now. Solar panels and electric cars and vegan diets don't stop the forest from burning this year, only boots in the black can do that.

Thanks for the writeup. I'm always amazed at the guys I work with that are college educated some are even lawyers.

I could tell you the sounds that EMTs make but not in public.

Well that's a complete cycle.
Mine is a bit more simplified:
A) Douchebag
B) Douchebag bartender
C) Bike Mech partial douche
D) Bike Industry fuller douche
E) Security Industry super douche
F) Age 47 WTF went to school with RN in mind
G) ER RN Mega douche
Will keep this up to retirement. I will agree that seeing change before your eyes, and the feeling of doing some good for the world, is at times unbeatable. Other times it's like beating yourself in the face with a mallet.

Good on you for taking charge. And thanks.

Update on the original intent of this thread -

I spent the month of June (which was unusually cool and mild here) layered up, suffering through any opportunity I had to overheat in a controlled manner (i.e. at home, near water and the ability to strip down if needed). I bucked trees, set fences, dug garden beds, mucked stalls...etc. all intentionally in the afternoon heat with a base-layer and a hoodie on, or a heavy flannel and a warm hat. By the time the heat came around in early July I was sitting outside with shirtless friends drinking beer while I was in denim with wool socks and a long-sleeve without breaking a sweat. I kept my neck covered with a bandana all summer to work on forced perspiration around the body's heat-channel.

In short, it all worked quite well. During the months of the fire season not a week went by without a medical evacuation due to heat-related illness. One person from our 20-person hand crew was sidelined for an entire 2-week run due to a heat stroke, while I watched hotshots in buggies headed off the fireline in California and Oregon a dozen times that I can remember in 3 months. Even on the 110F days I was running chainsaw for 12+ hrs with chaps on my Nomex without ever entering the overheating territory. I sweat like heck, drank more water than I knew possible, but never felt overheated.

Not exactly a controlled experiment, but my first reaction is that the process of controlled heat adaptation worked. I'll be working with a similar protocol next year going into the fire season.

I am sure @Octave knows all of this as do some other subject matter experts here...but a layman's terms article about the job for those laymen like me who have been following along on this fascinating thread....

https://wapo.st/3T4GhOS

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Originally Posted by htwoopup

I am sure @Octave knows all of this as do some other subject matter experts here...but a layman's terms article about the job for those laymen like me who have been following along on this fascinating thread....

https://wapo.st/3T4GhOS

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Great article, @htwoopup. Personally, the hardest part of the job is being away from home for 3 months (plus or minus a few weeks). This year I spent a month in California, plus another 10 weeks in southern Oregon. I saw my wife, dog, sheep, and homestead for 48 hours at a time where I basically did laundry, slept, went for a few walks, and tried to help around the farm as best I could (and brewed beer to have when I got back).

The inconsistency of the work from year to year is also difficult to deal with. And finding seasonal employers who are understanding of you leaving for the summer if you need the money to make ends meet between fire seasons is not easy. At the moment I'm slinging lumber for 9-10 hours a day at a local mill - I ride my bike there at 5h15 in the morning and get home around 16h00, it'll make enough money to make us comfortable for the year while I do some training to move up the ladder in the fire world and try to get to a pay scale where I'm able to not work much the rest of the year. For now it's staying in shape slinging lumber off a green chain and sweating my butt off. On that note, the heat acclimatization works wonders when I want to keep my sweatshirt on all day while we're hustling because I'm trying to avoid something hazardous (this week we are cutting Hemlock...).

I really don't mind the smoke, and I love sleeping in a tent at night, spending weeks at a time not even looking at my phone, and of course, there is no better feeling than walking into a grocery store and being greeted by someone who has a home at the edge of the fire line. It makes my heart feel full and gives me the passion to work 16-hour days in the hot sun battling 30ft flames.

Oh, and I do miss bikes in the fire season.

My background is in the maritime/power business and like bigbill, I have spent countless hours in engine rooms and 1960's vintage steam powerhouses where ambient temps in the 120-130's is common. I also have a reasonably extensive background in damage control and firefighting and am familiar with walking into a blaze with an SCBA on knowing fill well I'm relying heavily on the equipment. The fire side has never been my real job though, so I wont pretend to be a professional there.

There has been some good advice offered here, but I think you will find that it's all pretty individual. Everyone acclimatizes a bit differently and you'll need to really listen to your body with an honest ear to know how far to bury the gas pedal. The only other good advice is to foster the best of personal relationships with your mates in the field as you can. When your own brain is fizzled, a close pal will often know when to sound the alarm. The buddy system is critical in intense situations as you may likely see.

Fair winds Octave pal. In multiple contexts :)