June 21, 2017

Products for Running in Extreme Heat: Review

Running in the heat can take a lot of additional energy to cool off your body. For the Western States 100, I’ll be testing out Polar Products. Their products are designed for hot-weather activities like construction and they offer everything from neck wraps, cool ties, back wraps, wrist and ankle wraps. I’ll be reviewing the neck wraps, wrist wraps, and hydration bladder sleeves. My wife and I did a test-run today to see how they would feel, how heavy they get, and how much pre-soak they require. Pretty “cool” results! See below for details. I’m excited to see if these help me beat the heat of Western States this weekend…

I tried the wrist band today. As you can see, when it’s dry it is really no thicker or heavier than 2 layers of thin fabric. There is a lightweight velcro closure for easy on/of and there’s some play to make tighter/looser.

The instructions say “submerge the wrap for 20-30 minutes.” We tried 20 minutes just to check out the minimum.

After a 20 minute soak, the wrap clearly had absorbed a bunch of water and we removed the wrap.

When I first picked it up, I was very surprised by the consistency – soft and flexible. When you pull it out of the packaging, you can kind of feel these tiny little balls and I imagined those would be ok but kind of frictiony. I was wrong – it did not feel frictiony. Those little balls actually formed a really flexible gel that conforms perfectly over a round surface. As per the instructions, we patted it dry to get some of the water out of the fabric as the interior gels is where the cooling magic actually happens.

Here is a wrist wrap that is unsoaked compared with the wrist wrap that is ready to provide cooling action! The expanded tubes are about the diameter of a pencil or sharpie.