Saturday, May 18, 2013

Dehydration, Revisited

A few weeks back I did a post I called "Dehydration: Think 7-Up, Not Mountain Dew" wherein the color of your urine during and after an athletic endeavor is probably the best clue to whether you are drinking enough fluids.

A run earlier this week and daily life brought that home again, and I wanted to point out how dehydration is not always obvious in the sense of causation.

That run was undertaken during cooler weather, so I had no particular impression of copious sweating.  But when I got home my short, shoes and sox were all pretty damp.

Clue 1 ignored.

That morning I had run early and only had drunk a single cup of coffee prior to the run.  Then afterwards I had another cup of coffee, not a big glass or two of water. 

Clues 2 and 3 ignored.

Then I set out to working on some stone steps in a new flower bed (I'll post separately on that cool project, with photos, when it's done).  At this point I did sweat a bit.  Yet I still did not drink much.

Clue 4 ignored.

Gradually I felt a strong headache coming on.  I went to the bathroom to pop some Ibuprofen and figured I might as well pee while I was there.

Think Mountain Dew, not Seven Up--heavy yellow and not much volume.

I finally realized that I was dehydrated, and it'd had been creeping and building up throughout the day.  Not the result of a major athletic effort but more or less a cumulative result of not paying enough attention to the clues that were obvious. 

As an athlete I should have known better.

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