October 13th, 2009
I acquired bad hydration habits for two reasons.
The first was my philosophy on training – I believed that the harder a workout was to do, the faster it would make me ski. I thought workouts that were difficult to endure, such as going on a seven hour bike ride drinking only the two water bottles on your bike or running for four hours with no water at all, would somehow make me faster.
The second reason I didn’t hydrate well was that I had no idea why I needed to stay hydrated.
A couple of really tough experiences in high school should have clued me in to what I was doing to myself. The first occurred during my freshman year. I don’t remember all of the details, but I do remember doing a long tough workout in really hot conditions in the morning. In the afternoon I was sitting on the couch with a splitting headache. Everything noise, sound and touch caused pain. My uncle was in town visiting. He touched my arm at one point and I puked from the pain.
I remember the second experience more clearly. I attended a Rocky Mountain Select Team camp in Steamboat during my senior year of high school. I hate to drive, so I decided it would be good to shorten the drive to Steamboat by bicycling part of the way. I started at my home in Aspen and would ride the route my coach would drive to the camp. I asked him to pick me up when he reached me five or six hours later. Although it turned out to be one of the hottest days of the summer, I refused to refill my two 16oz bottles. I ran out of water at about 80 miles, but kept plowing along. At around 100 miles I was really suffering. I figured there wasn’t much difference between riding slowly down the road or stopping, so I kept going. I made it to 106 miles before I could barely make it up the hills. I pulled over. About 15 minutes later a motorcycling couple stopped for a break in the same pullout I was sitting in. They generously refilled my bottles, and as I was finishing what they had given me my coach showed up. In the car I plowed through almost another entire Nalgene. Twenty miles down the road I was puking it all back up. I wasn’t able to hold down any liquid for the rest of the afternoon and evening, and I had to skip the workout that afternoon and the running time trial the next day. It was a bad way to start a camp.
This summer I improved my hydration habits. I now know the importance of hydration, and making it second nature has become a huge priority for me. One method we’ve used to make me aware of how much I need to drink is to have me weigh myself and my water bottles before and after long, hard workouts. This has been a real eye opener for me. My worst hydration performance this summer happened on a road bike ride on August 10. During the workout I only drank 1.8lbs of water, I ate .4lbs of food, but I still lost 6.6lbs during the five-hour workout. Becoming more aware of how much fluid I can lose on a workout has has helped me drink more.
My coaches encourage me to drink more by requiring that I always have a water bottle when I work out. I now understand that I need to stay hydrated all day long, not just during a workout. I carry water bottles with me on every workout, no matter how short, and I carry a bottle with me throughout the day.
According to USST physiologist Randy Hill, our bodies can absorb 250ml (8oz) of liquid every 20-30min. If you drink any more or any faster than that the kidneys just remove the liquid and you pee it out. Because of the delay in the intake of water, I now set my alarm on long sessions to beep every 20 minutes. As soon as the alarm beeps I take a couple big gulps of water. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of a downhill or am striding up a steep incline. If I don’t stop right away to drink I will keep putting it off.
Randy has also helped me understand the physiology of hydration. The human body is at best 25% efficient. All the excess energy produces large amounts of heat. The body then produces sweat to cool itself back down. The majority of liquid is lost to sweat, but some is exhaled. This is more the case in drier, higher altitudes.
The better hydrated you are, the more blood volume you have. For the most part, the human body works more efficiently with greater blood volume. The less efficient your body is the harder your heart has to work. That’s why you get cardiovascular drift when you get dehydrated (your heart rate will drift up during a long workout.) Higher blood volume is more efficient because of something called Laminar Flow. Laminar flow has to do with the fact that the blood closest to the cellular wall encounters the most resistance. More blood volume means more blood is located in the middle of the vessel and further from the cellular wall. More blood in the middle of the vessel means less resistance on average.
It’s like adding lanes to an interstate. The more lanes you add, the faster traffic can move.
The last thing Randy emphasized is the need to drink before you’re thirsty. Once the thirst mechanism kicks in, it’s too late. You are already 2% or lower off of your normal body mass when the thirst mechanism kicks it. I am working hard to make hydration something that is a non-issue for me. When drinking before I get thirsty becomes second nature, I won’t have to worry about it, and it won’t hinder my training or performance.
Noah Hoffman is a member of the USST and the SVSEF ODT (Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation Olympic Development Team). Check out they SVSEF website at www.svsef.org and their FS blog at blogs.fasterskier.com/svsef.
Tags: Hydration, Noah Hoffman
October 13th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Noah, thank you for this helpful article. I too dislike to disrupt my training to hydrate and tend to delay this distraction. I also do not like to get wet, especially when it is cold. I sometimes get severe headaches after hard efforts, in particular after interval workouts and after races where I am working in the anaerobic range. I have been wondering about this and after reading your article I wonder if this is related to lack of hydration. I do not have a problem drinking after workouts or throughout the day; so now wonder if the headaches are related to not drinking during the workout?
October 14th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Great article, Noah. The hard numbers are especially helpful.
I noticed after recently moving back to altitude (6000+) that I my heart rate was increasing slowly over L2 workouts. Your tip on cardio drift might help, considering I hadn’t changed my drinking habits.
I’d also like to add that it’s extremely common for less experienced racers to make the same mistakes with food. For a few years I thought I was running up against my fitness in races, only to find that I was bonking *every single time*!!
Once I started eating enough endurance sports changed completely for me. Your experiences in learning about hydration sound exactly like my experiences learning about eating. I’ve seen others learn the same lessons, too.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Well put, Noah, it takes guts to talk about mistakes one has made, hopefully this will help other young athletes avoid this one. I certainly made my share of bonehead training decisions, it’s good to know I’m not the only one!
One way to describe the flow rate of blood through your vessels might be to consider it in terms of viscosity: too high viscosity/blood results in greater work by the heart to push the blood through your system. This is probably why a number of Dutch cyclists in the early days of EPO abuse died of heart failure in their sleep: their blood was like sludge after shooting up with too much EPO. (If a little works well, a lot works even better, right?)
Another side of the hydration issue is the need to replenish electrolytes throughout a long workout. By replacing electrolytes sweated out over the duration of the session, the athlete should experience less drop in performance towards the end of the session and recover better compared to hydrating with water alone. Using this stuff is not admitting weakness, it makes for more productive training.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Now, there’s also the idea of intentionally adding a bonk to the end of your workout to effectively make your body more efficient at burning sugar (or fat?), so it gets more efficient at burning fuel. I’m still a little confused on the details about that. I also assume that while that works for fuel, you instead always want to stay optimally hydrated?
October 16th, 2009 at 9:07 am
My understanding is that it is never beneficial to be dehydrated, but I could be wrong. Fuel on the other hand is a different story – as Patrick points out…
October 26th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Ben Arians writes about replacing electrolytes. I have electrolytes on a strip, so you can put two or more in your mouth, allow the strips to be absorbed into your blood stream, and “preload” your electrolytes. Then you can also pop a couple of strips during a long workout, ending, of course, with replenishing after your workout. These strips have made the world of difference in many people’s work outs and race times.
check them out at http://www.enlyten.com/kkuns.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:46 am
[...] as we call it is rare but it has definitely made me more aware of hydration. Noah Hoffman had an excellent piece in your “training tips” section a while back. I would urge everyone to read [...]