Despite all the pre-tournament chatter about the new heat stress scale at this year’s Australian Open, today was actually the first time it became necessary to fully understand the workings of it. It really was an incredibly hot day. Scorching, sweltering, scalding, sizzling; none of these words can really do justice to the experience of spending any amount of time outside today, where the heat was claustrophobic, headache-inducing and inescapable, the kind to bring human life to a standstill. My coping mechanism was simply to spend as little time as possible outside.