Dehydration - It's For Winter Too...

Butcher's Dog! Regular outdoor fitness tips from the canine on creatine. Cold wet nose and glossy coat guaranteed. Winter Hydration Matters Too Most of us assume that dehydration's mainly a summer problem - obvious really, it's hot, you sweat lots, you get dehydrated, but it's a lurking winter spectre as well. There may be a load of water falling on your head and running into your boots, but hey, guess what, it's not inside you, so it doesn't count. The bad news is that you're still losing fluid at an alarming rate in winter. Here's why: • lots of mountaineers and walkers dress warm for the cold, too warm when they hit a steep slope. The result is excessive heat production followed by reflex sweating to cool down. Nasty. • remember that attractive steaming breath thing? Well hey Mr Hiker, that steam is water vapour. Particularly when it's cold and dry, your body moisturises and heats the air you breath, so every breath is losing fluid. Just go breath on a cold mirror if you don't believe me. • with heavy boots and socks your feet sweat half a pint of fluid or more per day, in fact they do that even without heavy boots and socks. High intensity activity makes it worse. • it's tempting to top up with tea or coffee, but both are diueretic and promote fluid loss • finally for some reason, we simply don't register dehydration as fast in winter. Remember, your body lags behind and by the time you feel thirsty you're already dehydrated. Why does it matter? Tests have shown that as little as five per-cent dehydration can decrease your physical performance by as much as 30 per-cent. In winter when conditions are hard and days short, performance really matters and anything that reduces your ability to function is a potential risk to your safety. What to do? Just as in summer, you should drink little and often to maintain hydration levels - see my earlier article on hydration - a minimum of 500 ml per hour and preferably more if you're working hard. Start off well hydrated and keep sipping away. The colour of your urine is a reasonable guide and snow makes it easy to check as well. Ideally it should be as pale as possible - the more yellow it appears, the more dehydrated you are. Carrying Fluid Winter has its own problems - hydration systems have a tendency to freeze up, but you can improve things by using an insulating tube cover to protect the vulneralble narrow feeder tube and by blowing as much fluid back into the reservoir as possible. In seriously cold conditions the whole thing will freeze anyway, but there are now some winter specific systems aimed at minimising that possibility. If you're using a bottle, carry it inverted so that any ice forms at the bottom of the bottle and not at the neck where it will obstruct the opening. Wide necked bottles make this less likely to be a problem as well. If it's really cold, stow bottles in an internal pocket where the warmth of your body will keep things fluid. Eating snow is generally a bad idea. It's very cold, so it lowers your body temperature it could also be contaminated, which isn't great. If you do have to use snow as an emergency water source, try and melt it with your body heat or better still, boil with a stove. Always leave some water in the bottom of the pan to speed up the melting process. Oh and don't you go where the huskies go and don't you eat that yellow snow... Woof The Canny Canine