Water Intake Should Match Sweat Rate

Because readers of SportsGeezer understand that one third of medical studies get it wrong, no one should be surprised that we are revisiting a recommendation made last April that runners should go easy on water before and during a race. That advice, straight from a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the subject of this short piece in Outside magazine, which suggests that those runners who should go easiest are those who run the slowest, and have, in basic terms, too much time to drink. The trick to drinking and running, of course, is to balance fluid intake with fluide outflow, otherwise known as sweat. Toward that end, Outside recommends that runners first find their sweat rate. They can do that by carefully weighing themselves in the buff before and after training, while tracking fluid intake. One liter
of water weighs about two pounds, so if a runner drinks one liter during a
one-hour run and has a net loss of one pound of body weight, her sweat rate was 1.5 liters per hour.
Want a more complicated, but, we’re betting, more accurate measurement of your sweat rate? Try this one at Mama’s Health.com.