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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