Submit your own questions to Dr. Prescott
Adam’s Training Journal
When I headed to the Grand Canyon earlier this month, overhydration wasn’t exactly the first thing on my mind.
You see, my friends and I had planned a three-day hiking and running getaway in that big, hot hole in the ground in northern Arizona. Even in early May, temperatures on the canyon floor routinely reach 90 degrees, and the searing desert sun can raise skin temperatures another 15 degrees.
So when I arrived at the south rim of the canyon and took my first tentative steps down its mule-trodden trails, I was already intoning a mantra under my breath: drink, drink, drink.
Indeed, for the first two days of my odyssey—hikes of 24 and 6 miles—my mantra served me well. I had purchased a new Camelbak hydration system, a backpack equipped with a 100-ounce fluid “bladder” and an attached tube that allowed for easy drinking. The constant sipping kept my fluid levels up, notwithstanding the buckets I sweated in the oven-like environs of the canyon.
Still, on the third day, the train left the tracks.
That day, we mapped out a 42-mile mega-hike that would, literally, take us from dawn till dusk to complete. All went swimmingly until the crucible of mid-afternoon, when I began to feel light-headed and nauseated. Believing that the sun had leeched the fluids from me, I kept refilling my Camelbak and drinking more water. But—and as I only later realized—the more I drank, the worse I felt, to the point I doubted I’d be able to make it out of the canyon that night.
Fortunately, I eventually figured out the error of my ways, calculating that I’d drunk something like 300 ounces (about 2 ½ gallons) of water in the space of 10 hours. And once I stopped chugging (and peeing) and rested for a bit, I got reoriented and climbed out of the canyon, arriving back at the south rim not long after nightfall. But not before seeing two other hikers get Medi-Vacced out.
I realize I got lucky this time. But how can I avoid this peril in the future?
