Last week, temperatures soared and the sun shone brightly, with many people taking to the streets to enjoy the early arrival of spring. But a check on the environmental protection bureau’s website shows that air quality over these past two days has not been suitable for outdoor activities, especially sports.
With increasingly frequent smoggy days, runners are caught in a dilemma—whether to run or not has truly become a question.
At the end of last year’s Beijing International Marathon, a female running enthusiast carried a “machine lung” (a PM2.5 personal sampler that draws in 4 liters of air per minute, with the PM2.5 in the air being adsorbed onto a filter membrane for further weighing and compositional analysis), and completed the full marathon in 367 minutes, while also recording the concentration of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) she inhaled as an individual. This female runner, named Zhong Yu, is a sports enthusiast and one of China’s first generation of mountaineering aficionados. She took up long-distance running last year, but living in a metropolis like Beijing, air quality has become her biggest concern every time she goes for a run. The data Zhong Yu collected was analyzed and weighed by the School of Public Health at Peking University, revealing that the PM concentration of the air she breathed on the day of the marathon was 152.73 micrograms per cubic meter—equivalent to four times the World Health Organization’s daily upper limit for PM2.5 concentration (35 micrograms per cubic meter). Moreover, when running, breathing becomes deeper and faster, resulting in the inhalation of several times more PM2.5 particles compared to when not exercising. Therefore, as a running enthusiast, it is even more important to pay attention to daily air quality.
Currently, the websites of environmental protection bureaus in many Chinese cities allow users to check the day’s or real-time PM2.5 data, and there are also many mobile apps that provide PM2.5 information. Another simple method is to open an electronic map, find a high-rise building within a 5-kilometer radius, and use it as a reference for visual estimation—if you can’t see it one day, that means outdoor exercise is not advisable that day.
When outdoor running is not possible, you can choose to run on an indoor treadmill, ride a stationary bike indoors, or go swimming. Men can engage in strength training, while women might opt for yoga, among other options.
No matter how good your shoes or gear are, without good air, the meaning of running is lost.