The Silent Pandemic of Unhealthy Air

he West Coast saw another bad fire season in 2021, and we can only expect this to increase in the future. Summer wildfire frequency in the United States has escalated 18-fold between 1972 and 2018, with a five-fold annual increase in area burned (Chen, 2021). We know that poor air quality has negative health impacts, but we also know that lack of exercise is detrimental for our bodies. What many athletes are not discussing is this: at what point does lack of exercise become worse than exercising in bad air? Not getting out to exercise one day is no big deal, but what about a majority of the summer? Practicing medicine in Northern California, I have seen one patient after another who has explained that they stopped getting in their hikes/run/rides because of so many days with poor air quality, and then just never started again. For these patients, I wonder, “Would it not have been better for them to actually just get out on some