Posts Tagged ‘hydration’
Springing Forth
The multitude of flora on our property is springing forth at a variety of rates this year. To our surprise, some of our trillium are flowering earlier than we’ve seen before. That’s particularly thrilling for us because most of the bloomers are transplants we brought from Cyndie’s family vacation home up north.
We’ve had a good run of consecutive dry days, followed by a perfect evening rainstorm Monday night and it is making growing things very happy.
Getting the water right is key to a lot of things. I went for a scouting bike ride on Sunday to investigate a route that didn’t involve gravel roads. I was successful in that, but in so doing, I out-rode my water supply. The last spot I was planning to get a refill hadn’t yet opened for the season.
I decided to push for the finish on limited rations.
It’s not that hard. I limped home safe and sound, but I was unsurprisingly under-hydrated. What intrigues me is how long the evidence has lingered. Two days later, despite consciously increasing my usual daily intake in hopes of catching up, my primary barometer (urine color) revealed I was still behind.
Working on a long game toward optimal health involves an unending series of small daily efforts. It involves making corrections along the way for intermittent deviations.
As I prepared my breakfast and lunch last night for today’s shift in the mine, measuring the amount of cereal to meet my goals for grams of sugar, it hit me again how different my diet is from just a couple of years ago. I don’t expect I’ve yet reached a point of undoing what decades of a high sugar intake produced in me.
It was probably in the late 1980s that I attended a lecture that touted a mantra of eating like a king for breakfast, a queen for lunch, and a pauper for dinner. I embraced that part about breakfast with gusto, figuring my high activity sports habit was more than enough justification to eat whatever I wanted.
Portion sizes swelled, guilt-free. Meanwhile, my body tended to swell, too –despite the constant exercise of soccer and cycling. I miss eating too much cereal for breakfast whenever I felt like it, but I don’t miss how it made me look and feel.
Pondering the difference helps to reinvigorate my inspiration for staying on course for the long haul.
I’m feeling renewed energy to spring forth into another year of living well. Maybe it will bring me into full bloom sooner than I expect.
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Maintaining Hydration
My cycling friends know all about this one. Hopefully, so do my soccer friends. Well, I hope all my family and friends know about maintaining proper hydration. My method of choice for monitoring my status is simply watching the color of my urine. I have been amazed lately, how quickly things can change. Clear, clear, clear, clear, whoa–yellow!
There isn’t a gradual change, but suddenly a dramatic change. Now, there are other clues, if I am paying attention. Certainly, frequency of needing to go is one. At work, if I don’t get interrupted by needing to visit the restroom multiple times per morning, I should know that when lunch break arrives, I may find a change of color, especially if I played soccer that morning. But when I’m busy at work and don’t get forced to take bathroom breaks, I notice that I also often don’t break to drink water either and then the drop in level of hydration appears.
But I still find myself surprised when the change happens, and often times when it does, at how significant the change of color can be. The good news is that when optimal hydration is being managed, changes like this can be very quickly remedied. I can easily polish off my 24 oz. bottle of water in short order and see immediate response in urine color and amount (or frequency).
It’s not so easy if allowed to get to the extreme of dehydration. I will always remember the time Lance Armstrong got dehydrated during a time trial in one of his Tour de France races and the next day they reported that even with intravenous fluids added to his attempts to drink enough after that day’s race, he was still not back to optimal hydration yet because the cells can only absorb water over time. You can’t put it all back at once. It pays not to let ourselves get behind.
Speaking of Lance, what a performance in this year’s Tour on Monday as he astutely positioned himself for a possible group breakaway that actually occurred and bought him some precious seconds to move from 10th place overall up to 3rd, while other contenders totally missed out and were gapped by over 30 seconds or more. Team Time Trial today!
I love watching le Tour!
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