No matter whether it's summer, winter fall, any season will do. When you're running, you're losing a lot of water, you have to figure out how much should I be drinking when I get done? Ee actually can get this down to a relatively scientific measurement. So, that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of Runner's High.
I'm Jesse Funk. And if you haven't been here with me before, as mentioned in the intro, this is a show I called Runner's High where we talk about all things running. No questions are out of bound. So, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
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So, this actually goes with today's episode, how much water should we be drinking when we get done running? Well, I actually kind of covered this tangentially in a different video. I was talking about how to calculate your sweat rate in that video. If you want to see that stick to the end, I will leave a link here on the screen, one of those nice little pop-up links you can see, and click on that at the end of the video.
But what you want to do is basically figure out what your sweat rate is. The basic way to do that is weigh yourself before you run, weigh yourself after the run, do some nice conversions. And then you figured out I lose this many fluid ounces per hour of running.
That's the basic gist here. That's what we need to do, figure out our sweat rate, and then we can go say, we need to drink this much fluid. It seems relatively simple and it is. But once you figured out that sweat rate, then you know what you need to replace, depending on how long you've gone. You can use that as a base.
You say, Hey, I lose like me, I'm roughly like 43 fluid ounces an hour if memory serves right. So, if I went out for a half-hour run, that I know I've lost approximately 21-22 ounces of water, and I need to get that back in. More importantly though, you have to remember that you aren't just losing water, you're also losing those electrolytes.
Now there is some debate on whether you need to take those electrolytes back in, or whether you can simply eat food that contains salts.
Now, a lot of the people that I speak to on the Smart Athlete podcast, the other show that I do, who are nutrition and diet experts will often say there's no need to replace these electrolytes because we're naturally drawn to salty foods when we need to replenish those things. We've been doing these things for millions of years now. That's kind of what we have evolved to do, survive. So, we're going to seek those kind of salty foods out.
But my friend, Dr. Todd Buckingham, who comes on the show from time to time, he mentioned it's important to replace those electrolytes if we're going longer than an hour. That's kind of the magic time window. And he's done some research on this, he's conducted studies on really long endurance athletes.
We're talking about the people competing at Kona and the full Ironman, World Championship. And it's really about that magic hour where after that, you're going to need to start replacing those electrolytes.
So, keep that in mind too after you’ve done your sweat rate calculation that, hey, I need to replace my electrolytes if I've gone out, and it's longer than an hour. If you haven't, then probably you can not worry about it at all. You can just say, Hey, I'm gonna eat some salty food later, get some chips, get something for dinner, it's gonna have salt on it, and it's going to be perfectly fine.
The other thing to keep in mind is basically if you're thirsty, get something to drink. I know that seems simple, right? But it's a good guideline because you actually can drink too much. It's called hyponatremia. And it can be dangerous for you if you drink too much. Because as mentioned previously, you need to replace those electrolytes. And when you drink too much water by itself, the balance in our bodies between electrolytes and the fluid can be imbalanced and create problems.
There are famous cases of stupid radio contests back when the Nintendo Wii came out where there was the like, don't wee for a Wii contest kind of thing going on. And there were people who died because they drank too much water. They weren't allowed to go to the bathroom. These things got so thrown so out of balance that it ended up killing them.
Generally speaking, that shouldn't be an issue because you should be able to go to the bathroom and to stop drinking water when you're not thirsty anymore. But that's important to keep in mind as well. I'd like to throw that in so you are educated. Now, if you want to do that sweat rate calculation, that should be coming up on the screen here shortly.
Click on that, I'll explain how to do that in a little bit more detail as well as the math on how to convert from pounds to ounces, fluid ounces, all that kind of stuff. Click on that video that's coming on the screen shortly. And I'll see you next time on the next episode of Runner's High.