Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate!

• Posted: July 3, 2008
• |
• Author: Shéamus
• |
• Filed under: Workouts
• |
• Tags: 30 Minute Days

Come on Shéamus - it’s rule number one mate. If you don’t hydrate yourself properly before a workout, you’re going to suffer. I’ve been experimenting with varying my caffeine intake before my runs, which is fine. There’s a lot of nonsense written about the dehydration effect of coffee which given that it’s about 95 per cent water is little more than hyperbole; meantime, the energy-boosting benefits are worth their weight, assuming one has the constitution to avoid the dreaded coffee trots (which thankfully I do). I thought I’d try three cups today, spaced out over about six hours, plus a Coke, and see how it went.

That’s all well and good, but, about a half-litre of water aside, that’s all I drunk. End result: I suffered. Being just two per cent short of your body’s required fluids at any given time can result in a performance loss of 10-20 per cent.

It was a hot day, and windy, which is never a nice combination, but I set out in high spirits. After about 18 seconds I realised the pod for my Garmin that attaches to my shoe (that tracks the data) wasn’t secured properly and was making a repeating click that I knew would quickly become an irritant. So, I paused my watch and stopped to fix it. I started the watch again, and off I went.

Or so, at least I thought. You see, in the first few minutes of my run I like to have my Garmin on the ‘pace’ setting - this shows me how fast I’m going. I looked down and saw a comforting 7:37/mile, and was quietly pleased. After a while, I decided to switch it back to the ‘timer’ setting, but to my confusion it didn’t appear to be advancing - it was stuck on 18.93 seconds. This didn’t make any sense to me at all - was it broken?

About a minute on I realised my mistake - the watch was still in ‘pause’ mode. It sounds completely obvious now but with new equipment and in the midst of a workout your brain goes out of its way to deceive you. So, I started it up, but by then I’d already run for over two minutes that was not being tracked at all. This had quite a demoralising effect. I held it together surprisingly well, with my second mile coming in below 8:10, but after that I faded considerably. About twenty minutes in I started to dehydrate badly and after my run I had a pretty severe headache.

Check out the mess this made of my stats:

It’s actually worse than this - after I finished my workout, I pressed the wrong button to save the data and actually ended up start/stopping the watch a couple more times while I was walking, as you can see from the very end of my speed chart:

Nice job. All-told, even without the botch-up at the end, I ended up running for about 33 minutes. The good news - I was slightly faster than yesterday, and again managed a reasonable sprint finish.

Tomorrow, I have dental surgery at 10.50am so, in case that all goes horribly wrong, I’ll be running early - probably about 8.30am. I’ll make sure I hydrate myself sufficiently beforehand, and from now on that’s an absolute must.

Onward and upward!

• (3) Comments
• Permalink
• RSS 2.0
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•