Managing the Heat

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have been very fortunate thus far on this trip - great food, fantastic accommodations, and extremely friendly and helpful hosts. The lone major adjustment we had to make was to the heat of the gym facilities.

We arrived in Mexico Friday evening after a long day of travel. We had a great night's sleep and great breakfast and prepared to head to practice for 12pm - basically as the day was reaching its hottest point, and of course this day was predicted to be about 40 degrees Celsius.

Likely a combination of nerves and fatigue from travel, but largely due to the heat we had a very poor start to practice. We were unprepared for the temperature in the gym and lost most of our focus and concentration on what we were trying to accomplish. We are very fortunate to be traveling with a tremendous staff - Head Coach, 2 assistant coaches, manager, physiotherapist, doctor - all who have a lot of experience and knowledge of which we put into use right away.

Tracy, our physiotherapist has been fabulous at emphasizing the importance of hydration and monitoring intake of both Gatorade and Water since the beginning of our training camp in Toronto. This became that much more important in Mexico. To start, we are unable to drink the Mexican water so Jodi our manager and Julia our doctor are making daily runs to refill our water supply. Both Julia and Tracy have been fantastic now that we are in Mexico at monitoring and enforcing our fluid intake even more. In fact, we are the only team walking around with our water bottles wherever we go.

Beyond our fluid intake we took some other measures to help our bodies adjust to the constant heat. After our practice Saturday afternoon we got cleaned up then went for a walk - nothing too exhausting but enough that the girls were warm and getting used to breathing in the hot, humid air. We then spent some time by the pool which allowed them to relax and cool down while still being in the heat. We also have wonderful air conditioning in our rooms. However, we have set guidelines on how much they can use the air conditioning, and what the minimum temperature that can set it to. This means that there body temperature will not fluctuate as much and subsequently not feel as uncomfortable when playing.

So far so good with our heat management, hopefully this remains as our only off court obstacle throughout the tournament...

PS...notice our friend Carlos in the attached picture (shown again here). Carlos is a kitten who was hanging around with us before and after practice...we did not pick him up though.