On my daily wander through the supermarket gathering my provisions for the day I am occasionally drawn to the snacks aisle for a package of peanut puffs. It is rarely premeditated. I have passed it off an impulse-buy until I heard the sports physiologist Dr. Allen Lim, who is an authority on cycling, give a fascinating dissertation on sweating on the Cycling Tips podcast a couple of days ago. He said that when one is dehydrated and low on sodium one is drawn to salt. The body knows, he said.
He recommends sports drinks to keep one in balance. Gatorade was the first in 1965. Now there is a vast array to choose from. He asserts that drinking water isn’t enough when one is dehydrated, that it can actually be harmful as it will further exacerbate the imbalance between sodium and water in one’s system. There are salty compounds one can add to one’s water for a quick fix that are so salty they’d be repugnant if one weren’t dehydrated. One’s taste buds don’t cringe at excessive salt when the body is craving it. The instructions on one additive state to keep drinking it until it tastes salty, as it won’t seem salty when one’s body is short of salt.
Lim gave as an example a friend’s restaurant in Boulder. In the summer diners often complained that its food was too salty. The head chef discovered that his chefs working in the heat were semi-dehydrated and when they tasted sauces they were preparing they seemed to need more salt according to their usual taste test. When the head chef mandated his chefs keep hydrated with sports drinks, keeping their salt levels in balance, diners stopped complaining of too much salt.
Lim’s commentary will have me keep a stock of salty snacks in reserve, at least until I come upon the next Decathlon sporting goods store where I can get a container of a powdered sports drink for the hot days ahead. Sweating hasn’t been an issue of late, as it’s been cool and overcast as I reach Northeast France and close in on Belgium. I was happy for some sun yesterday so I could give my sleeping bag and sleeping pad a blast of sunshine to remove their dampness and also to eliminate a possible infestation of bugs.
I awoke with a rash of bites such as I have never experienced before on the soft untanned skin of my inner thighs and abdomen and the underside of my arms. I have no idea what feasted on me during the night. I’ve had a few of the usual mosquito bites and ticks attaching themselves to me, which are just a minor nuisance, but these weren’t from them. I’ve learned to be careful to brush off any of my gear I may have placed on the ground before putting them into the tent, less bugs, particularly spiders, have attached themselves. But something in the forest I camped in penetrated my defenses and has had me itching all day.
At least I could thrill to the preparations that Binche, just seven miles into Belgium, has made for its hosting of The Tour’s third stage departure three weeks from today. I followed the route the peloton will take due south from Binche to Reims and on to Épernay though small towns. The terrain through fields of wheat was mostly flat, broken by a few sizeable hills.
Shortly after crossing the unmarked border into Belgium a roundabout in front of a McDonald’s gave the first evidence I was in Belgium with its flag planted in its center and surrounded by cutouts of The Tour Jerseys. The main street through Binche where the peloton commence its day was lined with banners of Eddie Merckx. An oversized version of the same photo of the young Merckx adorned the theater in the city’s main plaza. In front were planters of flowers with yellow wheels and yellow frames. An aloft giant bicycle had been erected at the opposite end of the plaza. It was a stunning site. A lengthy mural of cyclists had been mounted several blocks down the route from a post that marked the official starting point. They all added to the building excitement of Binche’s historic day of hosting The Tour for the first time.
Rather than penetrating deeper into Belgium to Brussels thirty-four miles away, the site of the first two stages, one a team time-trial, I returned to France for a couple of day’s before my full immersion into Belgium wandering all over visiting its many cycling shrines. I wanted to drop in on Valenciennes, the smallest of the nine cities in France hosting the Women’s World Cup. The others are Paris, Lyon, Le Havre, Montpellier, Reims, Nice, Grenoble and Rennes. It was the only one that hadn’t been a Ville Étape during my fifteen years of following The Tour de France. The second of the six games to be played there had been played the day before.
I was hoping there might be a giant screen in the town plaza showing the USA-Chile game being played in Paris. The square did have an enclosure for fans to gather, but there was no screen showing games being played elsewhere. France is one of the favorites to win, along with the US. Hopefully the fervor will gather as the tournament gathers momentum and I’ll have an opportunity to watch France in the championship game as I did last year in a huge stadium after Stage Nine of The Tour when the men’s team won the championship. Far better to have sports to preoccupy one’s attention than current events.
2 comments:
George, I strongly disagree with the salt (sodium) cravings your sports’ medicine doc describes. People who are very low on sodium ( hyponatremic) crave water. I had one patient with remarkably low sodium and she arrived carrying a glass of water, this anecdote is confirmed in the literature. Her sodium was so low it’s amazing she was alive.
Gatoraide was developed at the University of Florida (hence the name) to prevent leg cramps in football players, but the cramps are caused by low potassium ( hypokalemia) which is also lost in sweat. Sports drinks replace both of these cations, but so do most fruit juices though with less sodium than the sports ‘ drinks. I reject the argument that taste buds change as people become hyponatremic. The brain (the hypothalamus I think) senses the drop in osmolality in the blood which is what causes us to become thirsty. (There are other mechanisms too that sense drop in blood volume.) That is the physiology as I was taught it.
Joel: Dr. Lim implied the craving for salt was mostly subconscious. He acknowledged that thirst camouflaged the need for salt. I can remember times in the sweltering tropics where I drank and dark and couldn’t quench my thirst as my body was demanding salt. Dr. Lim agrees with you that people are sometimes closer to death than they realize from their depleted sodium. I must have been there myself on more than a few occasions. I remember once having such a dry mouth I couldn’t eat anything even as I drank and drank.
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