I often bike to work at a place that screens all who enter for fever. Lately this has been done with a no-touch forehead thing, presumably an IR gadget. When I bike, even if it is cold enough that I wish I'd worn full-finger gloves, the final uphill makes me sweat, yet even so I consistently arrive with my forehead so cool that the gadget gives a number in the 92° Fahrenheit (33°C) range, or more often just refuses to give any number at all. When I make the trip by car, by contrast, it consistently gives more normal readings of 94.7° fahrenheit (35°C)
As a 65-year-old male on a beta blocker, I expect my body to run a little cooler than average, but 92°F (33°C) or lower for a forehead reading seems extreme. It's as if the biking itself is somehow an additional cooling factor. Could this be? Have others found this, now that "temping in" is grown so common?
I get that evaporative cooling with sweat is peculiarly effective for the cyclist, thanks to the air flow, and that the forehead is a prime site for it; but it hardly seems like that should make the forehead peculiarly cool, since (with apologies to Shakespeare) the blood is hot that must be cooled by this. (By analogy, the fins on a motorcycle engine also exploit air flow for cooling; but one hardly expects them to be cool to the touch after a long uphill has put their cooling capacity to the test.)