But don’t take my word for it! Are you sure you are getting enough?

One thing I see a lot of is the underestimation of how much you are going through. I mean electrolytes, fluids, and fuel. I feel like it’s a major contributor to feeling run down or even injured by the time you get to this time of year- late August. You’ve trained through the entire summer and with that, training has gotten much harder, more volume, etc. for a lot of you, you’re in that point of training hard for 8-10 weeks and still have long enough to go that it’s not a particularly positive feeling. 

To me, the struggle I had as a coach and even just being a resource on social media is how do do I get people to “just take my word for it” (read in LaVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow voice). I felt like so many runners feel like their situation is different than everyone else’s. It has to be something else, right? My problem is that I am a minimalist when it comes to technology. I think overall there is too much and the simplicity of running is often lost in the ever-checking of data. 

In any case, I happened to see an ad for some patch that released electrolytes or something directly into the skin. I thought of one of my athletes who is in Missouri. He’s a very heavy sweater and he has often just completely fallen apart over the summer- even after adjusting workloads and spacing workouts apart more. Nothing seemed to help. However, we both inquired about what was in them and they refused to tell us, citing proprietary blend. So. We were both out from exploring that any further. Neither one of us was interested in not knowing what was going to be absorbed through our skin. But then later, we both came across Nix Biosensors and this looked pretty slick. If you’ve seen the CGM patches, it looks along those lines. But this collects data through your sweat and then gives you an idea of what you are actually sweating out on a run. So, Jacob bought one and it’s been a game-changer for him over the summer months. I then recommended it to an athlete of mine in Texas. She was in the same boat as Jacob. She realized during a summer-long run that she was sweating out 55 oz per hour on her run! On top of that, she was expelling 3600 mg of sodium!!!! It was completely eye-opening to her as to how much she was going through. And from there, it made it easy for her to justify taking electrolytes in her water. Investing in high quality drinks and taking in much more during the day. Last summer, she struggled with her workouts. This year, it’s been in the mid-80s for her workouts and because she knows what she needs, she takes it. We just had a Zoom call last week and we discussed how she purposely tried to adjust expectations on her marathon pace workout, but she naturally just ended up at MP. When I looked at her data. Everything indicated that she handled it just fine and her following runs were fine. 

None of this is to say you need to buy a new gadget. I am not affiliated with Nix at all. However, I think if you are struggling with training but trying to convince yourself that it will be ok, then this is something that isn’t crazy in price, then it’s something to look at. If it can save you from injuring yourself, improve performance, and allow you to train hard without running yourself into a dead end then it could easily provide returns on the initial investment. 

At the end of this, I wanted to point out that it’s easy to underestimate how much you are using in terms of fluids and electrolytes during summer training. I’d run down (pun intended) and on the verge of knowing something was about to break in the wrong direction (trajectory, not physically) then so many times it is the simplest issue. It can be hard because it is almost cliche to say “Well are you hydrating enough? What about electrolytes?” So we often ignore that for something more glamorous. My advice is to always come back to the simplest answers first! Anyway, I hope that helps you if you’ve been on the struggle bus lately.