A few weeks back, I asked about swelling and someone mentioned that it was maybe Hyponatrema (sp?). While I could do more research, as there were others asking within my post, I will ask this question.
Today I did a 65 mile ride. I am in Texas and it is hot, however we left at about 6:30. Due to a flat from someone in the group and 1 stop at mile 40 for refueling, the ride averaged 18.5 miles an hour and right at about 4 hours.
The question is, did I drink enough or not enough for this ride as I was worreed about over hydrating the entire time! I had 3 water bottles. Two with gatoraid and 1 with water. They were probably 20 or 21 oz bottles. I finished them all. When I finished the ride, there was a water cooler where I had an additional 15 oz of water (3 large dixie cups). I had extra gatoraid with me, but was reluctant to drink it on the way home.
This was a long ride for me and I felt tired for sure, but feel fine otherwise. How did I do on the liquid consumption or is there more you want to know?
Really - it sounds like not enough. Try doing a brick and you’ll begin to figure out how your bike nutrition was on the bike. It took awhile but I figured out that my body needs salt/electrolytes for long workouts and races - performance is definitely better. Just finished up with a road race for 2:10 and I had 2 large bottles + a salt/eloctolyte tab which worked perfect. After, I drank a 32 0z. gatorade followed by a 32 oz. water + some food and I feel a bit dehydrated. Just something you have to experiment with over time.
One more thing I just thought of - definitely hydrate after your training as it helps recovery and can be as important or even more so than during training.
You’ll do yourself a favor to find out how much water you need to replace your sweat (and urine) by weighing yourself before and after a workout: be sure to include the weight of the same volume of water you’ve ingested during the workout. THEN, you need to do some guessing as to how much electrolyte you lost, ie, how “salty” your sweat is. I guess you could always just make sure you take in a balanced electrolyte formula that mimics the plasma values in your blood: sodium about 140, K+ about 4, Cl- about 100, magnesium about 2, etc., but, it might taste a bit like, well, sweat. Actually the electrolyte concentrations of sweat can vary greatly from these normal electrolyte values…so, you are still stuck with doing some guesswork about how much electrolyte to purposefully injest with your correct water volume replacement. For me, it’s an endurolyte capsule, or two, per large water bottle of water. Not very scientific, but, it serves me well.