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Hydration During Training
• Ethiopian Marathon Hydration Tips
• Marathon Pace Chart (pdf)
• Overcoming Obstacles
• Going Long
• Surviving an International Flight
• Race Week Nutrition
• Marathon Morning Tips
• Running Checklist
• Walking the Marathon
The Importance of Hydration in Training
By now, you’ve probably been bombarded with reading and hearing about the importance of drinking during the marathon. And obviously, it is very important. There’s no question about that, especially in a warm-weather race such as the Haile Gebrselassie Marathon, but it’s just as critical to drink more than you normally would in the days, weeks and months leading up to the marathon.
Why? Because in marathon training—indeed, any endurance sport—you sweat. You sweat a lot. And when you sweat, those fluids need to be replaced. If they aren’t, you will dehydrate and as a result, your running will suffer. So the importance of staying hydrated during racing and training can not be overstated. If you aren’t properly hydrated, it will hurt you in training and of course, in the marathon.
Experienced runners know all too well the feeling of being dehydrated and the symptoms: exhaustion, dead legs and a gradual slow down. Since they know what it’s like, that’s why you see marathoners carrying water bottles with them wherever they go in the last few days before a race. They drink constantly to stay as hydrated as possible before the big event.
The threat of dehydration is even more pronounced during warmer weather. The way your body responds to higher temperatures is to sweat more. That cools the body, but it also requires the body to work harder than on a cooler day. Since your body is working harder, it’s using more water. If the water isn’t replaced, the body’s ability to cool itself is reduced by sweating less. If you sweat less, the body is warmer and thus, runs slower and slower.
Even though experienced marathoners know the importance of staying well-hydrated during a race, they are often chronically dehydrated during the months of training leading up to the marathon. Too often, they rely on their thirst to tell them when to drink. But that doesn’t work well enough to keep up with the large amounts of fluid a marathoner in training needs.
So what’s a runner to do? Simply sit down and drink a gallon or two of water or Gatorade every couple of days to become fully hydrated? Well no. Your body can’t absorb water like a camel does and store it. You need to drink whatever the body needs on a regular basis to stay well-hydrated. But how much you drink to achieve proper hydration differs from runner to runner. It depends on how warm and humid the conditions are, how big you are, how much and how fast you’re training and how much you sweat. Exercise physiologists tell us that a normal person who is not training needs about four pints of fluids per day. So everyone needs at least that amount. That’s the minimum.
Clearly, a runner needs a lot more. The only reliable way to calculate your fluid requirements is to weigh yourself before and after running. Determine how much weight you lost during the run and then figure to become fully hydrated you need to drink an amount of fluid roughly equivalent to about 1½ times the amount of weight you lost. A pound of fluid lost requires about a pint of fluid to replace it. For example, if you did a two-hour training run, and lost three pounds during the course of that run (remember, weigh yourself before and after the run), you will need to drink about 4 ½ pounds of fluid (or about 4 ½ pints) over the next few hours to rehydrate fully. But you’re not out of the woods quite yet. Since you need about four pints of fluid anyway, your total for the day is nearly nine pints. That’s a lot.
Again, you just can’t sit there and drink it all in one sitting. But that’s what you need to be hydrated. The best strategy is to drink regularly throughout the day. Pound the fluids as soon as you get back from a run, but continue drinking all day—until your urine is clear (and not dark yellow).