Follow This Secret to Beat the Summer Heat!

Follow This Secret To Beat The Summer Heat!

Would you like to tolerate running in the heat better?

Do you find your pace slows down and your endurance is greatly reduced as the temperatures rise?

Want to know the secret of successful summertime training?

If you answered yes to any of these, keep reading, because I have some great news for you!

First, a little background…

You see, I used to hate running in the summer. I’d barely get a mile down the road before I’d find myself a dripping mess. Out of breath. Heart racing. Muscles locking.

All in all, it was frustrating. Dreadful. A time of year I often thought about staying inside.

Think about it. You spend months bundled up with layer after layer, shivering through the winter. The whole time, you’re praying for warmer temperatures.

Usually, there are maybe a few weeks of “decent” weather. And then…

BAM! We’re transported to some inhospitable jungle, only to be counting the days until fall.

It took years of trial and error, as well as countless hours of research, before I realized I no longer had to dread running in the 80s, 90s, and even 100s.

That it could actually be… enjoyable - even in higher humidity!

What was the secret? 

Knowing precisely how your body processes fluids. So you know what to drink before, during, and after any outdoor activity.

The differences, I found, were gargantuan. And they soon had me easily ticking mile after mile on muggy trails, while others would be stopped dead in their tracks.

Why bring it up now?

Well, it might not have felt like it the past few weeks, but summer is almost here.

With it, as seasoned runners, walkers, cyclists, and roofers in the Mid-Atlantic know, comes extra sweat loss. Lots of it. More than you’re probably thinking…

In fact, according to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, summertime runners, even those who paid attention to how much fluid they consume during exercise, underestimated their hydration needs by 23-50%, as humans can sweat between 1.3-3 liters per hour!

That’s up to 7.5lbs of sweat every hour!

To give it a little more perspective, without proper hydration, a 200lb person isn’t just guaranteed reduced aerobic AND muscular endurance… losing 7.5lbs through sweat means your blood’s thickening so rapidly that you could also start losing your motor skills and be knocking on heat cramp’s or stroke’s door.

For a 150lb person, the symptoms can strike even faster and be more severe.

Obviously, starting your runs or ANY outdoor activity properly hydrated and continuously topping off is best.

I’m sure you know that much already.

But here’s the catch…

There’s more to hydration than simply drinking water.
And not all “hydration” beverages are created equal.

In fact, the cheapest, most popular ones - the kind you can scoop at any corner 711 - are some of the least effective.

And something as simple as the type of sodium used in your beverage could either take you further than you ever thought possible, delaying your buildup of lactic acid, and keep you fresh mile-after-mile...

… OR it could put a knot in your stomach and stop you dead in your tracks.

For example, studies measuring sweat loss have proven that to get enough of the required sodium your body needs from Gatorade… you would have to consume 2.5 gallons of it every hour!

That’s right. 2.5 gallons. Every. Single. Hour. 

The biggest reason is that most common hydration beverages use NaCl - table salt - as their source for sodium.

If they changed their formula to give you the amount you needed through table salt, the drink wouldn’t only be unpalatable… the chlorine, which is used to produce stomach acid, would cause intense GI issues.

Fortunately, these days, you have options. Better options. Options that not only give you the sodium and many other electrolytes your body requires, they also do it without any stomach issues AND have also been proven to increase time to exhaustion through their ability to delay lactic acid buildup.

In other words, not only will these other options better hydrate you, they’ll also allow you to run more comfortably, harder, and for longer than before!

So what are these magical options?

The main companies fueling this new hydration revolution are GuBrew, Nuun, and Skratch Labs. All of them utilize either sodium bicarbonate and/or sodium citrate as their primary sodium vehicle.

Even better, both are equally absorbed, highly palatable, and capable of staving off the effects of lactic acid buildup in your muscles.

And here at Fleet Feet Sports in Mechanicsburg, our employees are not only hydration experts; we also carry such a wide variety of flavors of GuBrew, Nuun, and Skratch Labs hydration products that you could try a new one almost every day for an entire month!

Come on in and try some out, so you can beat the heat and enjoy your summer, instead of isolating yourself indoors with the AC.

Keep chipping the Utz,

Jimmy Mac