How Bad Was This Summer For Running?

Summer is always a tough time to be a runner.

But in the moment, it can feel terrible – like you’ve never experienced so much heat and humidity in your life. Then, when the weather breaks, it’s all just a fleeting memory. Until summer rolls around again next year.

The summer of 2024 certainly had it’s moments. It started with a massive heat wave – aka the “heat dome” – covering much of the United States. I remember a few weeks in June and July that were particularly uncomfortable.

Last summer, I wrote a series exploring the history of summer weather in Newark, Chicago, and West Palm Beach. So as soon as we got hit with this year’s heat wave, I was just waiting until the summer was over to do a retrospective on this year’s weather.

I wrote up the full analysis in Runner’s Life on Medium. If you’re not a Medium subscriber, you can request a special link to the article here.

But in the meantime, I’ll share a little bit of the data below.

What Data Are We Working With?

For this analysis, I collected three years of weather data from seven major metro areas throughout the United States. The weather data was sourced from Visual Crossings.

I defined “summer” as the thirteen week period following the summer solstice – June 21 to September 30. For each day, I collected the dry bulb temperature and the dew point at 6AM and 6PM.

The specific metro areas included are:

1. New York City (Newark)
2. Chicago
3. Miami (West Palm Beach)
4. Los Angeles
5. Houston
6. Dallas
7. Washington, DC

I created a basic dashboard on Tableau Public that lets you explore the data, which you can find here. On the dashboard, each day is color coded (blue to red) based on the temperature or dew point.

Here’s what the data looks like for the temperature at 6AM.

For the analysis, I also categorized days based on the temperature in 5 degree bins: <60F, 60-65, 65-70, 70-75, 75-80, and >80F. This made it easier to visualize the totality of the summer instead of the individual daily conditions.

So How Bad Was This Summer?

When I dug into the data, it was a mixed bag.

In some areas, the heat and humidity were far worse. In others, there were brief heat waves followed by periods of nice running weather. And in some places, it was nicer this year that it has been in other recent years.

Here are two specific visuals to give you a sense of what’s going on.

This visual shows the morning temperatures in Newark, New Jersey. From left to right, each color represents an increasingly warm day – with the blue, turquoise, and yellow being fairly mild and the orange, red, and dark red being hot.

In the New York City Metro area, this year was both hot and comfortable.

If you look at the right end of the visual, there are more red days. This would have been driven by the early heat wave coming out of June and into July.

But that tapered off by August, and September was unseasonably cool this year. That’s what’s driving the increase in the number of cooler days on the left side of the graph.

Meanwhile, here is the visual representing the early morning dew point in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The orange boxes represent days with a dew point of 70-75 – which is already pretty warm and disgusting. In every year, pretty much every day was at least this humid.

But the red boxes represent days with a dew point of 75-80. This is particularly humid, and it’s terrible to run in. There is a huge difference from 2022 to 2024.

This year saw far more of these excessively humid days – and far fewer of the relatively less humid days.

Without a doubt, I’d say this summer was much worse in south Florida that it has been in recent years.

How Was Your Summer of Running

For additional visuals and some more data, check out the full article on Medium or play around with the Tableau Dashboard.

I remember early this summer thinking that conditions were horrible. It was hot and humid nearly every morning, and in the late afternoons we were seeing temps in the 90’s. It’s just not normal for New Jersey to experience that for any length of time.

But, as the summer wore on, things evened out. I remember going out in late August and early September and thinking, “This is nice.” Meanwhile, last year the humidity continued well into September.

It’s easy to get lost in the moment – but it’s important to take a step back and look at the big picture.

How was your summer of running? Was it particularly hot where you were, or were you lucky to have some decent weather?