With the IRONMAN season in full swing after the the North American Championship on Saturday, and warm temperatures perfect for running and training outside fast approaching, athletes can be at risk for dehydration.
Dr. Ralph Holsworth, a board-certified family medicine physician and head of clinical and scientific research for Essentia Water, provides some tips for athletes to start their season fully hydrated.
- Listen to your body
- If you feel something is off, it usually is
- For instance, when athletes have a blood clot, it can often be manifested in an ache and “charley horse” type of feeling. It may never seize, but it will ache.
- Blood clots won’t feel like an injury because it won’t respond to rest, flexibility, or ice. Knowing the difference and acting quickly, listening to your gut, is key.
- Blood clots are one of the biggest risks to long distance athletes and runners and they don’t often realize that they are among this at-risk group.
- In fact, Airhealth.org says that about 85% of air travel thrombosis victims are athletic, endurance athletes like marathoners.
- Respect the recovery period
- The body is an incredible machine, but like all the best pieces of machinery, it comes with a user’s manual.
- The human body requires rest. Hydration is not enough and while it can aid in recovery, rest is key.
- Give yourself the much-deserved luxury of replenishing your body with all that it loses during training.
- Sip, don’t chug
- When you drink too much water at once, it does not go where it needs to go and often times passes through the system, failing to hydrate despite the big amount of water you may be drinking.
- Profusely chugging water and forgetting to do consistently can lead to dehydrated kidneys as the water may not be making its way to this crucially-important organ. Hydration activates the kidneys and if you’re not hydrated enough and they’re not activated, this can result in kidney failure.
- Drinking too much water can also cause cramping, as well as bloating and stomach pains, due to loss of electrolytes, such as potassium, calcium and magnesium.
- Keep your urine the color of straw (or transparent-yellow)
- Use your body as a tool to inform you of your hydration level. Keep track of how this changes throughout the day following training and how little or how much water is drank. Just how you keep a pocket book of records, training regimens, etc., log how much water you’re drank, what color it was, how you felt, etc.
- This will help you stay on track and force you to think about hydration as a must-do during training for optimal performance.
- Incorporate hydration in training schedules
- Think about what your 25, 50 or 100 mile practice run looks like…. When will you hydrate? Before, after or during?
- To avoid the risk of dehydration, incorporate drinking water in your timeline, such as how you would note when to speed up and slow down to maintain a good, healthy pace.
- Incorporating pit stops for hydration will make sure that you’re thinking about hydration without it slowing you down.
