I wear white arm sleeves and keep them wet on the bike.

On the run I have used the Desoto long sleeve run top. Keep it wet and put ice in the pockets.

Last year I tried these arm sleeves with ice pockets. I found it slow putting ice in the sleeves during the bike. On the run it was easy to put ice in the pockets. Keep them wet and they work well.
Arm Sleeves – Orange Mud Australia

I always wear a cap and keep it wet and put ice under it.

If you are exercising in the heat wear 50+ sun screen. I carry a small tube on the bike and reapply every 2 hours. Aid stations in Australia have sun screen. Too many people don't wear sun screen and get skin cancer later in life in Australia.

I just ordered the Orange Mud sleeves for the run. And also a cap where you put ice in the top of it. And a cooling towel. Hopefully this is not all too much.


And yes, I always wear sunscreen!

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

What socks do you wear for the run in an IM?

I've used Balega socks for ages. Do I need to google cooling socks? :-)

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

Its a simple one, but I try to throw a cup of water on my body every stop. Saves having to drink it, digest it and sweat it out.

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" I take my gear out of my car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of of their lives shocks me. "
(opening lines from Tim Krabbe's The Rider , 1978

I was going to say that when I've had hot races I've taken extra time in T1 to put on compression socks and that really helps me. In hot weather you can get swollen feet, which slows you down (and is uncomfortable), the compression socks help recirculate the blood so might be worth thinking about. Takes a bit of practice to get quick at putting them on, but it was worth it for me. I've had some of my best performances (relative to the rest of the field) in really hot races (40-44 degrees C).

As an aside, congrats on your KQ, your user name is familiar to me as someone who has been chasing that dream for a while, so well done and have a great race!

If you can, when running through aid stations tell the volunteers to splash you in the face with the water. Errr.... it feels way better than doing it to yourself. And I think you get a little shock of adrenalin from the unexpected nature of it. And they have a great time doing it as you run by shouting and pointing at yourself, "in the face". Try it and you'll find your pace that much less difficult to lean into a little harder.

Lots of good suggestions about the run.
So I will add a different suggestion that might be useful.
However if you get off the bike with cooked legs you're toast anyway.
I found that the ice cold water bottles I got in my last IM brand race poured straight on the legs during the bike went a long way towards me finishing the race.
The trick is taking (and juggling) two bottles at the same time, as the bottle dump is at the end of aid stations and not at the beginning. Too many bottles.

That is a good idea! I'm not looking for a PR or podium spot so if I had to stop and pour cold water on my legs or just use a porto potty, it would be fine. I'm going to be doing a lot of things that will cost me time that I normally wouldn't do in an Ironman. Heat management and just finishing is my goal. First time ever for that. I've never done a race where I worried about finishing it. This will be a first time due to the heat for that long. (thanks to my age as a 50 plus post-menopausal woman with now questionable heat tolerance lol)

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

Wear a visor so the brim in the front is going up instead of down. when you get to aid station fill up front of visor with ice. it holds the ice perfectly and as it melts it slowly drips down the front. Works so good if your a visor guy instead of hat guy.

There are some great suggestions here already.

I've seen some research that cooling the neck can prolong time to exhaustion in the heat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21214352/

Ultramarathon runners typically make a bandana into a scarf that can hold ice. If you search for pictures of "western states ice bandana" you'll see some good options.

Then from personal experience, I like the ice hat from Compressport that was mentioned above and I also find that wetting arm sleeves during runs can help to feel cooler. If you have access to a bag going from the bike to the run, then putting a tin of cold spray in there and using that in transition can also feel good and help a little.

Good luck for your race!

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Pulling this across from the bladder/bottle down your top discussion/thead. @bja1016 said:
. . . putting a cold bottle/bladder in your kit in Kona will actually cause an increase in your core body temperature, so that would have the opposite affect if you're trying to keep cool. And vice versa, a warm bottle/bladder on a cold race will cause a drop to your core body temperature. Watch this:

[And later from @bja1016:] Video at 18:45 to about 25:30 and then @1:47:52. To summarize this, humans are endothermic, which means we use thermoregulation to maintain the body's internal core temperature. The brain controls thermoregulation, in the hypothalamus specifically. For an analogy, if you're in a sauna that's 190 degrees and you put cold water on the thermostat, it's going to heat up the room, because the temperature was artificially decreased. The body works in a similar fashion, and our thermostat is in the hypothalamus, not on our skin. The skin has receptors which sends signals to the brain to rise or lower core temperature. So if you put a cold bottle or bladder on your kit, those receptors on your skin will register the cold against the skin and send a signal to your hypothalamus to increase internal core temperature.

There are three areas on your skin (glabrous skin surfaces) where this doesn't apply: palms of your hands, bottom of your feet and the top half of your face. So if you're trying to keep cool in a hot race (Kona), you'd be better off wearing a cooling glove than applying a cold towel or bladder to your chest, back or neck.

I know this sounds completely counter-intuitive, @bja1016 said

This is a fantastic article. As Doug wrote, the best ‘cooling gear’ you can carry on race day are the physiological changes you’ve created through heat adaption:

• Increased blood plasma
• Increased sweat rate
• Lower threshold for onset of sweating
• Less sodium in the sweat
• Less decoupling of heart rate from pace/power

In the weeks leading up to a race, we recommend 10–12 heat sessions, each having 45–60 minutes in your heat training zone. (To get haemoglobin gains you’ll need ~5 weeks of this, and that’s a different discussion.)

One point to add to the article – doing heat training ‘by feel’ has some risk to it. While it’s relatively easy to know when you’ve reached a core temp/skin temp combo that causes adaptions (you’ll be sweating profusely)…it’s very difficult to judge when those temps are getting too high and you’re overcooking yourself.

Even if you don’t reach a danger zone (nausea, dizziness, headache, etc), training too hot causes a lot of stress on the body and can leave you too exhausted for regular training in the following days.

That’s why we recommend heat training be done with real-time monitoring of core temp, skin temp, and a new metric we call the Heat Strain Index…it’s a formula that measures overall thermal stress on the body. The idea is to get enough thermal stress to cause adaptions, but not so much that you’re exhausted for your next workout.

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CoreBodyTemp.com
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No one mentioned sitting in a sauna. My husband built a wood fired sauna in one of our post and beam barns. We purchased a nice big sauna stove with the sauna rocks (Kuuma stove Finnish Wood Burning Sauna Stove | Finnish Sauna Heater (lamppakuuma.com). I have been sitting in my sauna 4-5 times a week most of the summer and still doing this. It gets about 100-110F (sometimes higher) and I stand close to the stove where it feels very hot and sweat a ton. Feel good after doing this.

It's not warm where I live right now so heat training outside is not really possible. Highs in the 60sF doesn't cut it. And my pain cave is nice but in my basement which stays a nice cool temp in the mid to high 60sF. No heating zone down there but I get warm w/o a fan. But not really great heat training. I have an Endless Pool I can turn up but swimming above 81F feels uncomfortable. I could dress warm on the bike trainer and treadmill a few times before I leave.

Really hoping the sauna will help me out.

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.