What to do amid heat and pollution alert? Biking and basketball
- July
- 12
Here’s another hot weather story. Amid air pollution alerts and soaring afternnoon temperatures Monday afternoon, my 17-year-old son set off on his bike for a 5-mile ride to play basketball. And not hoops with friends, but a competitive full-court game.
He must have gotten heat exhaustion because he wound up vomiting at the end of the game and laid down alongside the court to recover. He later told me that he felt like closing his eyes, but was afraid that if he did so he would wake up in a hospital.
Of course I only pieced together this story, with some details coming from my wife, near midnight – after watching “The Bronx is Burning” (see my previous entry). Like many kids, my son gives out information on a “what-a-teen-thinks-a-parent-needs-to-know basis. So he slept through dinner after telling me only that he had felt sick while playing basketball and now wanted to rest.
Not that I would have been especially alarmed. He seemed to have gotten enough water to drink since the episode. I suspect the combinations of bad air and heat, biking and basketball andd perhaps not enough water caused his problem.
It’s not like I never did anythig like that. I celebrated my last day of undergraduate school on a mid-August afternoon playing tennis on a day when the temperature hit 102 F. Must have been dry heat. I guess all we can do is provide a little guidance and hope our kids will survive to adulthood when, with any luck, they may learn to come out of the mid-day sun.
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