Yes, that’s right…over hydration not dehyrdration. There is such a thing.
Here’s a cautionary tale from my own travel experiences…
About 4 years ago, I took part in a 400km Marie Curie bike ride for charity in Vietnam with my Mum whose ovarian cancer had just been re-diagnosed. I was the youngest on the trip, she was the oldest!
[Side note: That along with a group trip to the Mexico, Guatemala & Belize stand out so far as two of the best ever trips I have ever made - usually a bit shy of groups, these experiences totally changed my mind about group travel].
One of the things we’d all been warned about was drinking plenty of water of course. Cycling for up to 5-6 hours each day, we needed to keep even more well hydrated than we would simply blobbing by a poolside.
After a couple of days of acclimatisation, our cycling trip began along the very dusty, very noisy & very busy highway 1 just outside of Ho Chi Minh. Tough going it was and at a
welcome break after an hour swigging sugar cane juice and fresh mango
juice from a roadside stall, we were all knackered and swigging back
the copious amounts of water provided by our excellent back up team.On the bus at the end of the day, Charlie, our guide asked if everyone was feeling ok – one of our group, a girl said she felt a bit ill. When we arrived at our hotel in the hills (3 hours from the nearest city), she was still feeling ill and my Mum had to help her shower and then put her to bed.
Skip forward 2 hours and on return from our dinner (she’d stayed in bed), she was worse still and had fallen unconscious. They drove her back to HCM in a minibus (over a 3 hour drive) and straight to the nearest hospital where they couldn’t work out what was wrong with her.
After 2-3 days (our cycling trip continued but in a very subdued manner), we had word that she was out of the coma and they’d figured out that she had over hydrated and completely screwed up the electrolyte balance in her system because of it…with everything being far too diluted to be effective. She fully recovered after a few weeks but had absolutely no recollection of the event nor the trip afterwards.
So just how much had she drunk? Well, we’d been advised to drink approx. 5 litres of water a day whilst we were cycling but this girl had drunk 5 litres of water the day before we started cycling, as well as at least that on the first day of cycling. Apparently she had hardly sweated on the ride nor had she had to pee that much either so the intake of water was disproportionate to the amount she was losing or that her body needed. Scary story and it certainly gave everyone food for thought…
And what does this mean for LIPs?
Aim for around 2 litres of water a day as a minimum, irrespective of your body size or if you want a more accurate measure, multiply your body weight (in kgs) by 0.033 to get your recommended intake in litres. And don’t forget, if you are more active & sweating considerably more, increase your intake accordingly but don’t over-do it…if you’re not losing water by sweating or peeing, don’t over-do the increase in your intake.
While thankfully I’ve not fallen into a coma, I have had the experience of stuffing up my electrolyte balance and feeling really quite poorly as a result.
I wasn’t actually off in an exotic location (I was in sunny Surrey) and I’d had a few sociable pints the previous night. But despite it not being particularly warm I found that the more water I drank, the more thirsty I got – it became a vicious circle.
Soon, I had a pounding headache, was feeling very weak and deteriorating rapidly as the day went on. Having an unquenchable thirst I kept drinking more water and unwittingly making things worse.
Finally, I made the connection and got online to get the proper mix of salt and water to make some oral rehydration salts -
8 tea spoons of sugar (I used molasses) + 1 tea spoon of salt to a liter of water.
It still amazes me thinking about it now, just how quickly I began to feel better – it was almost instantaneous!
While I’ve not made any significant trips since the incident, I’d want to make sure I had some packs of oral rehydration salts (you can buy them from most pharmacists) packed in future.
I found by little brush a bit frightening, but a coma… that’s the real deal!
Wow Donal…that’s quite the “morning after” story, isn’t it?!?
You were lucky that you made the connection totherwise you’d have been in serious trouble by the sounds of it.
The other option to rehydrate in the tropics is to drink coconut water…the electrolyte balance is almost perfect for humans so it’d be hard to over-hyrdate and mess up he balance on that. That’s my excuse anyway :-)
Believe it or not it is true. I am a football coach, and I have run numerous races (only one marathon, my knees can’t take much more than 15 miles), and although I have not over hydrated myself I have heard many stories of world class atheletes who have done just that.
There is a balance of too much, and not enough. I have not heard of a good rule of thumb, but it is easy if you listen to your body. If you are sweating a lot, drink a lot of water. If you are in a hot climate, and you should be sweating and are not, drink water, you are probably near dehydration.
I have been very fortunate to have spent 6 months living in Norway (split over two 3 month periods).
It’s a remarkable country and although it’s expensive, I’d still recommend it for a LIP adventure if you happen to like amazing landscapes (mountains, fjords, glaciers, forests, waterfalls…you probably get the idea).
It’s also a country where people are still very much in touch with their environment – the national pass-times are hiking and skiing depending on the season.
What I found interesting is that, this connection with their environment seems to give the Norwegians a greater awareness of their bodies – I’d hear them, after a hike, say “I need some salt”, recognising the signals from their body.
I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to say that there are probably parallels between our disconnection from our environment and the ability to ‘listen’ to our bodies.