Hydrate for Happiness

“Hydrate for happiness.”

When it comes to your endurance training and racing, does this advice make sense to you?

I talked in my last article about how gratitude helps you to be happy with your endurance running or walking.

Now I’m talking about hydrating for happiness.

And you — reasonably — may be wondering…

“Which is it: gratitude, or hydration?”

Well, it’s both. You need gratitude and hydration, if you want to be happy as an endurance runner or walker.

You see, I don’t care who you are, but if you don’t take care of your body, then you can practice being grateful every day for all aspects of your endurance running or walking … and still not be happy.

Why? Because gratitude is necessary but not sufficient.

Everybody Needs This

You also must take care of your body.

Your body includes your mind, from my perspective, in a “body-mind” sort of way, but that’s a topic for another article.

And proper hydration is one of the core ways in which you take care of your body … and your happiness.

If you don’t hydrate well,

Your blood goes into sodium imbalance.
You run out of energy.
You become irritable with fellow runners or walkers.
You finish endurance events hunched over.
You wake up crankier.

… and on and on it goes — all leading to unhappiness.

“Your Mileage May Vary”

How can you hydrate well?

You can overhydrate, by blindly following advice to drink X glasses of water a day.

Or you can listen to your body, learn more, and drink different volumes each day until you get it right for your situation.

But here’s the deal: Your “situation” depends not only on you but also on how much you are exercising on any given day, on what you wear, on what you are eating, on your stress level, and on the weather — as in the temperature and humidity.

In other words, your situation can change every day.

So I cannot give you any hard and fast rule about drinking X glasses per day.

A Simple Approach

Instead, what you should try is something extremely simple.

Weigh yourself immediately before training or racing. Weigh yourself afterward. For every pound you lost during your race or training session, and assuming that liquids, not solids, were your primary intake, you underhydrated by sixteen fluid ounces. (Or, if you gained weight and did not overeat, then you overhydrated by sixteen fluid ounces for every pound that you gained.)
Away from training or racing, keep a journal of how much water you drink and your energy levels throughout the day as well as when you were getting out of bed the next morning. After a few weeks, you should start to see some correlation.

I guarantee that by following these two simple suggestions you can hydrate for happiness!

Simple, But Not Necessarily Easy

Simple, though, is not the same as easy.

For example, if I ask you to run fifty miles in a westward direction from where you are now, then it’s as simple as giving you a compass. But this does not mean that running fifty miles will be easy for you.

Similarly, the approach that I outlined above is simple but not necessarily easy.

So here’s a question for you:

What tool or technique do you use
to make it EASY to stay properly hydrated?

I have my own technique, but I would love to hear about yours first.

Please answer this question in your comment below, to start the dialogue!