UKH

So what’s anyone’s tips for rehydration after a sweaty run? 
I currently drink a fair amount of water during a long run but never electrolytes. When I get back I’ll have an isotonic and lots of water but it still takes about 24 hours to become rehydrated. Should I take anything for the run or is there anything I can have that is quicker?

Cheers

Milk.

How far are you running, and how are you checking you're dehydrated?

Up to about 30k on sundays but the warmer weather is making a pretty big difference now unfortunately.

Very mild headache, luminescent pish.

I often see people drinking chocolate milk after races but assumed it was a sugar thing.

You should probably take in some electrolytes, but you can make your own very cheaply, a teaspoon of sugar, and as much salt as will stay on a spoon handle ( so just a tiny pinch ) in a litre of water.

Just drinking water will washout you bodies electrolytes and can be very dangerous at the extreme. A friends mam and sister ended up in hospital, while cycling in France from just having water.

I can't remember the advantages of milk, but it wasn't  the sugar, I was talking about normal milk, but I suppose chocolate milk would work too.

My nutritionist partner says skimmed or semi- skimmed milk is the current go to. (can't remember which) I will ask her. 

Eugh really? I find milk pretty grim at the best of times personally, and it feels horrid in my stomach. Would only be worse with running for me!

To the OP: buy some electrolyte tablets from literally any reputable sports Nutrition brand. I use the SiS ones as they taste best to me.

Erdinger Alkholfrei. Does a good job of aiding rehydration and almost tastes like real beer. I'm led to believe it's given out at the end of some runs on to continent.

24 hours to rehydrate . Really ? 
on what basis is this ? You take in fluid very fast and efficiently. Sports and drink companies make lots of money selling various electrolyte drinks. 
If you really feel dehydrated eat a bit of sodium containing food with some sugar containing food and drink. Sodium co transports glucose across the gut membranes and water follows. 
Don’t be taken in by expensive pointless drinks . 
 

You do realise that there is a pandemic going on and running 30km and worrying about your personal welfare is perhaps a bit selfish?

eh?

OP, sounds odd, are you hydrated normally? What sort of time frame is this over? 

Re milk, milk shakes are awesome in recovery but during? Most of us have some lactose intolerance, we don't break it down that easily. We basically want sugar and water on a run and some electrolytes.

For me hydration starts the night before, I'm not downing pints but drinking a bit more than normal so I know I'm fully hydrated. As long as its below 20 C or so I'm fine for around 2 hours.

I think some care is needed with the idea that you can bank fluids. Larger than normal amounts of fluids can cause renal medullary wash-out that means you are subsequently unable to concentrate your urine efficiently, just when you need to do just that.

I agree, people running with a large handheld bottle on short runs must alter their form, with very little benefit. 

I also eat quite a large roast/desert when I get back. I try to avoid drinking fizzy drinks just on principle but maybe the lack of sugar combination is the culprit 

I’m usually well hydrated on weekends and out of work time. I make an effort to be well watered/fuelled the night before a race and on some longer races I actually take an electrolyte with me so I should probably just take my regular runs a little more seriously. Part of the reason may be not wanting to strip and clean my bottles every weekend but the black slime forming in the nipple has made me change my ways.

"but the black slime forming in the nipple has made me change my ways."

That's the reason that I don't put anything other than water in my water bottles.

Carrying a bottle on a run seems annoying to me.

I can equate to your long rehydration process. I do not run half so far as you, doing somewhere between 7 and 10Km. When I get back, I find that I am not that thirsty quite often. Then I have to force myself to drink. Then there can still be a lag effect, whereby I end up feeling thirsty very late in the evening. I satiate that thirst and take water to bed, which is all downed in the night. Yet still the following morning, I can still be dehydrated, and occasionally have a minor headache.

I think that some of us have a poor hydration feedback system in our supposed homeostasis. The sensors and nerve tracts do not report back sufficiently swiftly to the brain."

In my experience the need to eat and drink is never there during or immediately after I just know I have to. If I think to myself during a run it’s been a few kilometres since I have had some water I’ll force myself to take a gulp but once I have I can’t stop myself from taking a couple more. Similar thing with eating although harder

Try weighing yourself before and after. After a long summer run I can be 2-3kg lighter! It's a good indicator and has been used on some of the more extreme races in the past to make sure people are safe to go on. Having said that there is some evidence that being a little dehydrated doesn't knock performance that much.

I have been using NUUM and have not had any problems, but I do wash the bottles and mouth-piece in Anigene every now and again. 

Don’t stress too much over it. If you are urinating and sweating you’re only slightly dehydrated. 
 

If your urine is dark it’s because you are secreting large amounts of electrolytes and your body naturally balances them out using this method. Chucking more in won’t make the situation any better if your body is trying to get rid of them. 
 

Drink and eat normally, it’ll take a while for it to balance out again. 
 

If you are getting headaches this is also a sign of low blood sugar levels. Have something sweet. Lots of people are trying to go low carb while running long, which really isn’t a very good idea. 

This might be an interesting read (bearing in mind they're selling a product, of course):

https://blog.skratchlabs.com/blog/hyper-hydration

I didn’t say that.. but most people are dehydrated.

On a long run?

I find that can be true for short races up to 10k, anything after that dehydration is pretty dangerous to play with, especially in the Spring.

https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/70/suppl_2/S132/1811529

Abstract

The field of research examining the link between dehydration and endurance performance is at the dawn of a new era. This article reviews the latest findings describing the relationship between exercise-induced dehydration and endurance performance and provides the knowledge necessary for competitive, endurance-trained athletes to develop a winning hydration strategy. Acute, pre-exercise body weight loss at or above 3% may decrease subsequent endurance performance. Therefore, endurance athletes should strive to start exercise well hydrated, which can be achieved by keeping thirst sensation low and urine color pale and drinking approximately 5–10 mL/kg body weight of water 2 h before exercise. ****During exercise lasting 1 h or less, dehydration does not decrease endurance performance, but athletes are encouraged to mouth-rinse with sports drinks. During exercise lasting longer than1 h, in which fluid is readily available, drinking according to the dictates of thirst maximizes endurance performance.******  In athletes whose thirst sensation is untrustworthy or when external factors such as psychological stress or repeated food intake may blunt thirst sensation, it is recommended to program fluid intake to maintain exercise-induced body weight loss around 2% to 3%.

If you're exercising hard enough to worry about dehydration, then there's a very real chance that you're hammering your body in other ways as well.
In particular during the recovery period, your immune system might well be weakened and if that coincides with the a high viral loading then you might not be as immune to Covid-19 as you might think being a fit person with a low BMI, etc.  That could well result in hospitalisation up to and including Intensive Care.
There's also the fact that if you're running 20 miles then you're pretty much knowingly taking the piss out of what is acceptable by the recommended exercise set down by the Government.  There are posts about climbers/boulderers being seen and quite rightly criticised for doing so.  Are they doing any more harm than someone running 20 miles because they feel they need to? 
Everyone needs to make changes to their lives to try and curtail the virus.  We as climbers have voluntarily stopped climbing due to the fact that any accident could lead to a unneeded Mountain Rescue call out and could ultimately result in a vital bed being taken up in a hospital.  Why can't runners take a similar stance and say to themselves, well actually, I don't really need to do a 20 miler as trying to set PB's or training for a particular event is pretty pointless in the current situation that is going on.

It’s hard to know where to start.

the government don’t say you can’t train more than an hour. A 20 mile socially distanced run would be 2.5 hrs. 

re drinking, you should think about hydration. A 2-3 hr Training run will not leave a fit runner immunosuppressed. Stop making things up with no grounding in science.

Re your comment re Climbers. Cochrane reviews have just said we should keep doing aerobic exercise.

you do you. Focus on you. Keep safe. Keep isolated. Don’t make up rules for others.

Be careful about over hydration. It's a killer. Drink when your thirsty, it's a complete fallacy that you need to be sipping all day. 

Train fasted, on a low carb diet and you'll slowly find you need to drink less. Remember top level marathon runners drink only a couple of mouthfuls during a race and most eat only once.

I'd avoid sugary drinks too, they give you a sugar high which can cause a subsequent sugar crash, loss of energy and excess stress on the body. To test if you really need to replace electrolytes then taste a tiny quantity of salt, if it tastes sweet you should add the tiniest amount of salt to your water and an equally tiny bit of sugar. 

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If you're fat adapted you don't get headaches from  low blood sugar levels. 

Low carb distance is fine if you're adapted. However to get there you can't expect to run at race pace for a while. My body took 8 weeks to adapt and a further month to be comfortable at long distance, I can now run 6 hrs over fells without more than 500ml of water so long as I stay in my z1/2.

However it's not suitable for everyone and takes time and dedication to achieve, for some and others will never manage it because their body can't adapt. Depends on the person really. 

You are fat adapted if you’re a long distance runner. 

But you are running slowly at that effort. 

I was once winning a 50 miler, hitting mile 45, grabbed the coke and had a lecture like the one you just wrote about drinking sugar..

The guy at the aid station just looked at the guy lecturing me and the other leader and said 'these guys are 20 miles ahead of you..' We were running about 7 min miles for 50 miles with 6000 ft of ascent, at the time we were both in pretty good shape. 

You can't compare fluid requirements and energy requirements from totally different activities.

If you are running at a solid pace for 2-3 hours you will sweat heavily and you will need to replace those fluids. I regularly run for 1-2 hours with no fluids or carbs, but if I'm racing anything over 10 miles I need fluid on board.

If I'm running a solid 15-20 miler on a warm day I will need fluids. The human body cools itself by evaporative cooling. You can't cheat that process. 

The symptoms of dehydration are virtually identical to hypernatraemia. Dehydration kills a bit more slowly. Hypernatraemia can kill in just hours or less.  

I always drink cold water and nothing else after a long sweaty run and this is more than enough to rehydrate myself. I don't trust any artificial drinks even with those claiming they have electrolytes in it. Not sure what horror they put in their drinks aside from the good ones anyway.

A pint of half fresh orange juice and half water with a good pinch of salt is quite refreshing. If you get the amount of salt right you won’t even taste it. 

Avoid so-called sports drinks. They are just heavily marketed sugary rubbish and probably do more harm than good.

Just water alone can also be harmful, because the salts eventually get flushed out of your body without replenishment.

During and after a sweaty day in the hills I use Dioralyte, which contain the correct amount of electrolytes to combat dehydration. Although Dioralyte is primarily designed to help recovery from the effects of diarrhoea, the effects of loss of salts and sugars is similar during long periods of sweating.

The sachets weigh next to nothing and can be carried easily to mix with water.

The blackcurrant version makes the taste bearable.

Good old flat coke is sugary rubbish but its sugar. I cant touch dioralyte, I gag going near it. I think just one of those bad associations with being ill.

I have used salt tablets on long runs in very humid conditions and they have helped. I know people say you don't need them but they've certainly seemed to stop my cramping.

I did a 50K two years ago when it was 90F and humid up in the Fingerlakes of NY, just brutal, but regular drinking and salt tablets and I held it together well and came second (and I didn't win a giant carved wooden cow).

Dioralite is a good old fashioned special forces selection trick. Ideal. 

All this makes you wonder how we’ve survived this long.