How to Best Carry Water during a Run

Audio Transcript

Jeff: Welcome to the Runners Connect, Run to the Top Extra Kick Podcast.

Today’s question is from Mary.

And Mary asked, “I have a question about hydration. I am used to carrying a 500 milliliter bottle of water for all of my runs. However, this has proven not sufficient for my long runs.

I’ve tried to carry another bottle around my waist, but that leads to severe chafing. Any suggestions on how to manage the hydration part?”

Mary, this is a great question and this is something that occurs quite often, and we see a lot of in our forums, on the Runners Connect site, where athletes are upping their distance.

Maybe the athletes are training for the first marathon, first half marathon, something like that, and they need to figure out how to carry the water with them in a really comfortable way.

Obviously, the hydration system or hydration pack that you’re currently using isn’t working for you. So, we need to find another hydration solution. Here are my two suggestions.

The first is that you can continue to use your current hydration system but find a way to refill that bottle.

So, it can come in two ways. This is what I like to do before, because I did a lot of my training back before hydration belts were even a thing, like they just weren’t available.

They were on the running market.

So, what we would do is we would do a long run to where we would loop by, either back by the house or back by our starting point, a couple of times.

For a 60 mile run, that still means you can do a five mile loop and end up back at the same starting point every five miles.

What we’d do is we would just leave our water bottles at that starting point and then pick them up, drink, and then either carry along with us for a little while, et cetera.

You could use the same strategy and say, “For my long runs, I’m going to do a loop. Let’s say my water bottle will last me 10 miles.”

And you can do a 10 mile loop, and you only have to do it twice. It’s not like you’re going to be repeating things, it’s not like you’re doing a mile loop up to 20 times or something like that.

Basically, just have another water bottle already filled up, or in a situation where you can easily refill it, and then bam!

Or you get back to that 10 mile point, refill your water bottle or snap on the next one. And then you’re good to go. Solution solved; nothing else you need to buy.

So, the other solution is obviously buying a new water carrying system that works better for you.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. If you like to have it around the waist, there are special belts that will allow you to carry more than one with you, sometimes they use smaller bottles.

So, instead of having two big bottles, you’ll have five smaller bottles. This kind of distributes the weight around a little bit more and can make it a little bit more comfortable.

The other thing that you can look at is hydration stuff like backpacks. The backpacks these days are fairly comfortable.

The camelback is like the most famous one, but there’s definitely a lot of brands where you can strap the backpack on and it allows you to drink a little bit easier.

Like you drink basically out of a hose that comes out of the back of the backpack. They used to be more uncomfortable, probably 15, 20 years ago, but they’ve improved a lot.

They are pretty comfortable. So, definitely something that you can try out and see if that works for you as well.

The other thing that you can do if it’s specifically chafing, is you can wear or use some anti chafing products on that area.

If it’s just one area, maybe in the belt that’s really bugging you, you can use Vaseline or some gels.

There’s some specific, running type of Vaseline. But it’s like anti chafing products that you can buy, like your local running store, et cetera.

They are like Body Glide, that kind of thing, that you can put on the area that can help potentially reduce that chafing and get rid of it for you.

So, that covers some of the basics.

Those are some basic suggestions, based off my experience and what I’ve seen with other runners.

But in order to get a little bit more in depth with you about this question, I want to look at what your hydration needs are for that particular run.

I say this because I think a lot of times, runners over estimate how much they need to drink on their long runs.

They assume that they need to drink and drink and drink some more. But what research has shown is that you don’t need to rehydrate all that much in order to maintain your health, safety or your performance.

So, what I encourage you to do is google runnersconnect.net/hydration-calculator, and you’re going to see an Excel spreadsheet in which you will put in a bunch of variables: Your starting weight, your ending weight, where you start your run, what rate you end your run, how much you drink, how much you might have lost, et cetera.

And then we do all these cool calculations for you.

We show you exactly how many ounces per mile you need to drink, what your electrolyte level needs are, sodium, potassium, magnesium, et cetera.

When most runners do this, they’re surprised at how, I don’t want to say how little they need to drink, but how off they are in terms of how much they’re estimating they need to take in during a run.

The really cool thing about this calculator is that once you do it a couple of times, then you can start seeing exactly what your hydration needs are for different types of runs.

Kind of what I talked about yesterday in my podcast about a heart rate training.

You can make a cool little spreadsheet that says, “Okay, today it was 50 degrees and 50% humidity, and I need five ounces of fluid for 30 minutes.”

And then you can say, “Okay, when the temperature is 70 degrees and 80% humidity, I need this much more water.”

So, let’s say it’s eight ounces. And that is going to allow you to plan your hydration better so that maybe you’re in a situation where you don’t even need to take that extra 500 milliliters of water.

Because with this calculator, we can even get it down to the minute.

We can say you need 0.44 ounces per minute of running. And so, the really cool thing is you can just calculate it out, “Well, I’m going to run for 90 minutes, times 0.44. This is how many ounces of water I need for the entire run.”

That way, you’re not carrying around excess water, which isn’t a huge deal but obviously in your case it is.

Because if we can eliminate it so that you don’t need that extra bottle, then you’ll run more comfortably, and enjoy your runs more.

What this will solve is it’s going to allow you to not have a sloshing stomach.

Not be drinking unnecessarily, and especially in a race, not be taking in too many carbohydrates because you’re drinking this ton of Gatorade or sports drink, and then taking a gel and getting your stomach upset.

Now, that’s a whole other topic, and if you’re interested in that, you can just google runnersconnect.net/hydration marathon nutrition.

And you can see, we’ve done a ton of videos and articles on how to marathon fuel, but it’s a factor that you want to consider in there.

I hope that helped answer your question, Mary, and hopefully gave you some ideas, not only about what you can try for your water carrying solutions, but hydration in general.

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Thank you so much for joining us and have a great run today and a great weekend.