IN late summer, Sharon Henderson, the manager of the Lululemon athletic clothing store in my town, started organizing Saturday morning group runs. People had two options: three miles at a slower pace or six miles at a faster one.
Do you exercise less in bad weather? Share your strategies for forging ahead in the cold the rain.
There was a good turnout at first — more than two dozen people, most of them slower runners, showed up.
Then they stopped coming. Was it the string of gray, rainy Saturdays?
Granted, it is difficult to get up and be at Lululemon by 8:30 a.m. when the temperature is dropping and a steady rain is falling. But, still. One recent Saturday, it was just me and my friend Claire Brown running on the slick streets in the rain.
Very few studies have asked whether people exercise less in inclement weather and, if so, which ones are more likely to slack off or forge ahead. Maybe that’s because the results of the studies are not exactly surprising.
“Why do people work out more in San Diego than in Michigan?” asked James Pivarnik, an exercise physiologist at the Michigan State University. “Gee, I can’t imagine.”
HIS study of Michigan residents found that people expended 15 to 20 percent morecalories a week exercising in the spring and summer than they did in the fall and winter.
Something similar seems to happen in Columbus, Ohio, said Janet Buckworth, an exercise physiologist at Ohio State University.
She found that college students lost cardiovascular fitness in winter but maintained their strength, indicating that while some of them did not want to go outside and run, at least they may have been going to the gym.
“Columbus is incredibly dreary in the winter,” Dr. Buckworth said. “It is wet and cold, and we get snow.”
So maybe the question is not, “Why do people stay home in dreary weather?” as much as, “Why do some go out and exercise anyway?”
Dr. Buckworth said that, in her experience, it was the people who were new to exercise who gave up in bad weather.
“If you are beyond the point that you are learning how to exercise, you can’t imagine not running in bad weather,” she said. Her advice to people who want to keep exercising all year: find something you can do indoors, plan to exercise with a friend or do something — like update your playlist — that can make your workout more fun.
Dr. Pivarnik tells people they need to make up their minds that they will have a regular exercise routine, no matter what. “If you are one of those people who are going to back off, you are just going to have to find something to make you do it,” Dr. Pivarnik said. “It has to be a behavioral thing in your head. It’s not going to happen just because the weather is nice, you have to think about it.”
My friend Jen Davis, a physical chemist, uses a term from chemistry: Running on dreary days requires high activation energy, she says. In chemistry, activation energy is what must be added to start a reaction.
But those of us who exercise in all sorts of weather will attest that there is a certain thrill that can come from terrible conditions. “It makes us tough,” Jen said. She calls our runs in horrendous conditions “epic runs.” And she’s right. They are truly memorable, ones we actually recall fondly.
There also are epic bike rides, as Richard Armington will attest.Rich, a software engineer in Montgomery, N.J., rode 200 miles over two days in a cold rain recently. It was a fund-raising trip for Battle Against Hunger, and his group had been training all summer.
Last year, the group rode in a hurricane, but that proved too much — the bikers had to stop at lunchtime on the second day, three quarters of the way through the trip.
“Why do I do this?” he said. “For me, it’s two challenges: the athletic challenge and the challenge of getting others to sponsor and give to the cause.”
Glenn Swan, a cyclist in Ithaca, N.Y., says his area has some of the worst weather in the country, but he does not let a little rain or snow stop him. Mr. Swan, a research technician at Cornell and owner of a bike shop called Swan’s Cycles, said, “Our phrase is, ‘We ride even if the sun shines.’ ”
His epic ride took place with friends in Virginia. They started at the bottom of a mountain on a sunny morning. Soon it started to drizzle. “We said, ‘At least it’s not raining,’ ” Mr. Swan said. Then, as they ascended, it started to rain.
“We said, ‘At least it’s not snowing.’ ” Then it started to snow.
“We said, ‘At least the snow is not sticking.’ ” Then it started to stick.
By the time they got to the top of the mountain, they were in a blizzard. They eventually made it to a lodge, 20 miles away, where they spent the night. And they have been talking about the trip every since.
But the problem with epic runs or rides is that each one ups the ante. A day with just ordinary bad weather simply is not memorable after a while.
Jen and I noticed that recently on a dark, rainy, windy night. We had planned to run after work but — just this once — we thought that maybe we could do one of those mind-numbingly dull treadmill runs in the gym.
I called my coach, Tom Fleming, and told him our plans. He hates treadmills, thinking that that if you want to train for road races, you have to run on roads. Treadmills, he says, are “propelling you over the running surface.” When you run, he adds, “you propel yourself over the surface,” which can include hills, flat areas, and places where the surface is uneven. “That’s a harder effort for sure,” Tom said.
So, Tom told me: Don’t go to the gym. Run outside.
So we did, and it was fine. Fun, actually.
But epic? No. We have had much tougher runs than that.
