lightheir wrote:
BionicMan wrote:
lightheir wrote:
BionicMan wrote:
Spoke wrote:
Noakes argues the sodium content of drinks makes little difference but that it is the amount you drink that matters.
Drink too much and sodium levels drop. He advises drinking to thirst. http://sweatscience.com/...-noakes-vs-gatorade/ First off, are you Noakes? I just want to understand since it's not clear and you have posted his information many times. Almost seems like a sales pitch.
Secondly, if you drink to thirst, it's too late, unless you are really slow at the event/effort. If I wait until I'm thirsty, I'm screwed. Period.
I have encountered the situation where I drank too much water leading to a 70.3 race without supplementing electrolytes. I got to into a hyponatremic state (or at least darn near it). Ended up in the med tent for over an hour. My caretakers even brought over the rookie caretakers to see what could happen to people when they were severely undernourished.
I received fantastic care (Racine 70.3) and 6 weeks later fixed my nutrition/hydration issues at IMKY when the temps were 92 during the run. I modified my full IM race based on what happened in Racine and I know it helped in IMKY.
Believe what you want but some of us have our own physical experiences to confirm the science.
Uhhh, I think you explained your own mistakes above.
You can slightly lead thirst, but it is a grave error to drink by plan only and ignore thirst.
If you drank enough to actually get hyponatremic, you clearly GROSSLY ignored your thirst. This cannot happen by accident. The only way you get hyponatremic with normal kidneys is to ingest free water wayyyy over what your thirst mechanism tells you. If it were so easy to do this, the human race would have died off eons ago, since sodium balance is so crucial for metabolic functions in cells.
The thirst mechanism is one of the most powerful, crucial evolutionary traits we have. It is so accurate that it rehydrates your fluid levels down to the 1cc level reliably (we've tested this in class - people who are hydrated will drink exactly enough, and once fully hydrated, will pee out EXACTLY the extra fluid they've taken in, down to the 1cc, It's amazing, actually.)
Doing hard effort endurance sports in hot weather may allow for slight leading of the thirst (drinking early), but you clearly missed the boat on that if you drank so much you were actually hyponatremic. (Make sure you know you actually WERE hyponatremic before saying you were - that typically requires a blood electrolyte check - it's definitely not the same as just saying 'based on how I felt I know I was hyponatremic', since there are so many other factors that can land you in the med tent for an hour that are NOT hyponatremia.)
I'm not sure how the problem happened. It had never happened before and hasn't happened since. I've done several long events, including several 70.3s. This particular one was a few weeks before my first full IM so I was really trying to dial in my hydration plan. I live in the south and am a heavy sweater and during hot and humid times a very salty sweater. I like working in the heat and had trained in it so it wasn't as if I wasn't prepared for high temps and humidity.
I normally don't take in enough fluids, so the days leading up to the race and especially the day before I really drank a lot of water. I thought with my normal diet I wouldn't need to be consuming extra electrolytes. The day before the race I probably peed a dozen times or more and the color was clear. I thought that was a good sign but clearly I did something wrong, because I started cramping during the bike. Even my arms, shoulders and neck were cramping, in addition to my quads and calves. When I got off the bike I couldn't move. Literally. I had to stand there for a few seconds before I could take a step. It was one of the most painful experiences I've ever had - and I have an artificial hip so I know pain.
It's not like I exerted myself harder than before because I didn't. I put way more effort into the bike at Kansas and Branson the year before. My training didn't change and my diet didn't change except for drinking more water leading to this race. I took it as a good lesson and made changes for IMKY and had a successful race with zero cramps.
I don't know if I was hyponatremic or even how close I was but my research made it seem possible. I tried to add a qualifier but I guess I shouldn't have mentioned it. Regardless, it was a terrible experience and I'm convinced it was directly related to my hydration leading to the race.
If you say it this way, I actually doubt that hyponatremia was the sole cause of your problems. In fact, odds are FARRRRR more likely that the overall fatigue (multifactorial, but sheer fatigue being the most likely culprit) was the major factor, and that hyponatremia may have been a total nonissue given that you didn't say you were forcefully drinking against thirst.
Tough race and training days do happen. With certain conditions, you push harder than you're capable of. With Ironman, the intensity is low, so you might not think you're going hard, but in reality, compared to your fitness level for the time and with challenging conditions, you almost certainly went to blow up zone. Once' you're blown, everything can hurt. Even breathing can hurt.
But that does not mean you should invoke hyponatremia as the cause. Hypoonatremia is a real entity in endurance sports, but is still considered a rare event. Like 1 out of thousands, or less.
If you haven't already read this, it's probably worth reading for those following this thread. It's a discussion with Noakes and the Dr.'s at Ironman Hawaii among others...
https://ce.gssiweb.com/...;level=2&topic=6 "The majority of the hyponatremic athletes at the Ironman are markedly clinically dehydrated, and the mechanism for their hyponatremia would appear to be related to high sodium losses in association with inadequate sodium and fluid intake."
tj
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