Remember when you were a kid and all your coaches and camp counselors and those vaguely hippie-ish guys who took your youth group hiking would tell you to drink, even when you weren’t thirsty? Turns out they were trying to murder you.
Source: Sports Medicine Journal Reveals Our Childhood Coaches Tried To Kill Us
I recommend reading one of my previous posts about trying to drink a gallon of water a day. It has some interesting info about diagnosing the colour of your urine 😀
Leg muscle cramping is a big issue for runners, and it particularly gets a lot of play in marathon and ultramarathon circles. When cramps hit, there’s really nothing you can do but walk. The traditional argument for the causes of cramping boils down to one or both of the following factors…
Source: Race Cramping: Causes and Prevention
We don’t know what cramping is, but we’re ruling things out.
It’s been months since I had leg cramps. It was in the pool, and I can’t remember why it would have occurred. I remember it being more frequent, for myself and others, when swimming after running. Most often, the cramps would be triggered by pushing off the wall when swimming laps. This is part of why I only do two of the three events (swimming, cycling, running) in a day.
In the 1930s, it was generally accepted that the body needed sodium to function, but no one had studied what broke down when the sodium in a person’s diet was removed. One researcher researcher and four volunteers decided to find out. It was awful.
Source: The Horrible Things That Happen If You Don’t Get Enough Sodium
Salt vampire! Star Trek – s01e05 – The Man Trap
I remember one person telling me that you “train with water, race with sugar”. While maltodextrose is good for energy, round out what you ingest with other electrolytes and such like:
