The mercury-shattering European summer pants alongside us on the back straight, looming as we hug the shadows, sweaty sandals on the parched earth. Across Asia, Africa and North America, inhabitants have endured the warmest July of their lives.
In Toronto, Alex Hutchinson, author of the bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, has just come back from an early run. “Here I am in Canada, a famously frosty country, and my general take when I wrote ‘Endure’ in the 2010s was that heat was not that big a deal. Occasionally, people died of heat, often in the deep south of the US, often returning to football practise in August, when they were not prepared, but that was rare.
