Simple Marathon Training Tips to Prevent Dehydration

Dehydration is one of the main causes of injuries in marathon training. During dehydration your body loses fluids and essential electrolytes, a situation that can lead to muscle cramps and fatigue. Whenever you exercise, you are using your muscles to accomplish whatever activity you are doing. Your muscles need enough fluids to function efficiently. Your body is made up of about 75 percent fluids!

Simple Marathon Training Tips to Help You Stay Hydrated

Drink Plenty of Water Before, During and After Marathon Training Sessions

Marathon Training or any long distance endurance training for that matter demands a lot of energy and water for optimal performance. The lack of either of these essential components can be detrimental to your body. When you are doing marathon running or training, your body uses glycogen for energy which is easily converted from the carbohydrates you consume. When carbohydrates and glycogen reserve have been depleted, your body can turn to stored body fat for energy (that is why you lose weight in marathon running) and in some cases protein if the fat supply has been depleted.

For all these energy sources to be effective your body needs water. You also need water to control your body temperature and prevent overheating during marathon training. Additionally, your body uses water to get rid of lactic acid that develops during marathon running or training. Therefore to ensure that your body functions properly, you need to drink plenty of water before, during and after your marathon training or running.

Replace Essential Electrolytes Lost During Marathon Training

Rehydration means more than just water intake. When you do your endurance training such as in marathon training, your body loses water together with essential electrolytes. These electrolytes are vital for water absorption and retention by your body. Drinking just water will not be as effective to your marathon training. You also need to replace the lost electrolytes and the simplest way to do so is by supplementing your water intake with sport drinks. Most sport drinks are great for electrolyte replacement. Remember that I say sport drinks not energy drinks, there is a difference! Please try to avoid energy drinks; they are not great for marathon training. They actually dehydrate you instead of rehydrating you.

Carbohydrates Help Your Body to Retain Fluids During Marathon Training  

Marathon training is one of the few sports where you are encouraged to consume a lot to good carbohydrates for better performance. Carbohydrates are not only the primary source of fuel in marathon training or running, but also known to help your body to retain water. Most people have been misled to think that carbohydrate intake should be minimized to cut down on body fat. The good news is in marathon running or training, you don’t have to worry about gaining weight, if you are following a good marathon training plan, you should have no problem with controlling or losing weight.

There are several other marathon training tips that tell you how to stay hydrated, but these are just a few of them. Feel free to explore this site for more marathon training tips. Finally, ensure that you are using a reliable marathon training plans for optimum performance.

Dealing with Overheating in Marathon Training

Regardless of the marathon training plan you may be using, you will encounter overheating at some points in your training. Unless of course it is winter time in which case you need to pay attention to dehydration. Dehydration and overheating are mistaken by most marathon runners to mean the same thing, but they don’t. In other words you can be dehydrated without being overheated or overheated without being dehydrated during your marathon training. However, overheating can cause or speed up dehydration in some cases especially during intense marathon training.

Dehydration is simply the loss of body fluids beyond the normal level. Overheating on the other hand is subjecting your body to extremely high temperatures usually higher than the normal body temperature. This happens especially if you are doing your marathon training during the day with high temperatures close to body temperature. The situation can be worse if the humidity is high which means your body is not cooling down as fast. Remember your body cools down when you sweat and lose the sweat fast. When you do your marathon training in highly humid conditions, your sweat doesn’t evaporate as fast therefore blocking most of the heat under your skin.

How to Prevent Overheating in Marathon Training

Consider the Local General Weather When you build your Marathon Training Plan

This is really important especially if you live or will be doing your marathon training in an environment with unstable weather conditions. For example most areas along the coast are generally warm and humid, but the conditions can be much hotter during summer heat. Therefore it may be easier when building your marathon training plan to schedule the demanding trainings sessions for morning when the temperatures and humidity are still lower.  In some extreme cases you may be forced to complete some of your training sessions indoors such as on a treadmill or running in a pool. Whenever you change your training to indoors, it is advisable to modify your marathon training plan accordingly. For example if you had planned to run 20 miles outside, you obviously don’t want to do the same on a treadmill.

Consider the Altitude at Which You Will Be Doing Marathon Training

Altitude plays a huge role both in temperature and humidity. The higher the altitude the cooler it gets and the lower the humidity. If your marathon training plan is designed to be used at higher altitude you will still need to pay attention to overheating. The fact that your body cools down faster at higher altitude even with high temperatures means that you are losing more fluids through perspiration. It is therefore crucial to pay closer attention to your hydration level during your marathon training as the training altitude rises. Unlike at lower altitudes where you can actually feel overheated easily, higher altitude can be deceiving. You can be overheated during your intense marathon training sessions without realizing. This is due to much drier air at higher altitude.

These are just some of the few ways to consider when building your marathon training plan that can protect you from overheating. Remember overheating can be life threatening especially for beginner marathon runners. Also remember that there is no marathon training plan or program that can prevent you 100 percent from overheating, you have to take reasonable precautions as a runner.

There are several kinds of Marathon training plans or programs available online today especially for beginner marathon runners.  This means that you can either be successful or unsuccessful in your marathon or half-marathon running based on the type of marathon training plan you choose. Though this challenge may not be as bad for elite runners since they have more experienced coaches, beginners may not be as lucky. So how can you determine if your marathon training program is effective or just another waste of time?

Here are some tips to help you rate your Marathon Program and make the necessary changes:

A good Marathon Training Plan should accommodate your goals:

Though most marathon programs are designed differently, a good plan will accommodate the goals of the person the program was designed for. For example a marathon training plan intended for beginners will not be effective for more experienced runners and the vice versa. Many beginners get frustrated and quit few days into their marathon training by following marathon training plans that do not meet their current reasonable goals. It is okay to overachieve, but you must be careful not to follow someone else goals.

A Good Marathon Program should neither be too hard nor too easy for you:

This should not be mistaken with periodization within a program which is necessary for recovery and adaptation. Remember you can only make progress in your marathon training if your body can recover and adapt to training as quickly as possible. If your program is too easy, you won’t make any reasonable progress since you are not stressing your body hard enough to produce the necessary physiological change. However, if your marathon training plan is too hard, you may get frustrated and quit due to possible injuries, lack of motivation or overtraining.

An effective Marathon Plan includes benchmarks:

There is nothing wrong with training continuously until your important marathon race day. However, there is no point of following a bad marathon training plan for three months only to find out during the race that it was not effective. Rather than waiting until it is too late, do some time trials or run some road races after every four to five weeks of training. This should be included in your program if it is well designed.

Choose a Marathon Training Plan with good recommendations:

Your coach can help you when it comes to recommending a good marathon program. However, if you are a beginner and you have no coach to guide you, find a program with good testimonials. Don’t waste your time following a training plan just because it looks good on the paper, read what other users have to say. You can easily tell the difference between a good marathon training plan or program and a bad one. Here is an example of a marathon training plan for beginners with good testimonials… Click Here to read the testimonial