I have been training Brazilian jiu jitsu for seventeen years. That’s 119 in dog years. So, not surprisingly, sometimes I feel like Spike, and sometimes newer grapplers remind me of his eager compatriot Chester. In this clip, Spike galumphs down the street, flanked by a hepped-up Chester, who tries to engage Spike in an activity.
Remember when you were younger and you could eat whatever you wanted for weeks straight and burn it off in a single week of strict eating and training?
That’s not going to happen for you at forty. Nor is being able to have a late night during the week and then be capable of anything even close to your best the next day. This is natural and all part of the gradual slowdown as we age.
Years of being told to “hydrate, hydrate, hydrate” caused first-time Ironman athlete Dan Fontaine to overlook the dangers of overhydration.
He had been training for his first Ironman for 12 months. Dan Fontaine thought he had done everything right.
“The only problem was my plan had a big flaw,” 32-year-old Fontaine said almost five years later.
It never occurred to Fontaine that drinking too much during the race would dilute his blood-sodium levels to the point that he would vomit violently and be left on the side of the road, unable to continue for hours.
Fontaine was never officially diagnosed with exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH), a potentially life-threatening condition characterized by dangerously low blood-sodium levels. But he has since researched what happened to him and has confidently deduced he was hyponatremic in 2010 at an Ironman race in Penticton, British Columbia.
An athlete who drinks too much during exercise runs the risk of diluting blood-sodium levels to below the normal range of 135 to 145 millimoles per liter. Symptoms of EAH include fatigue, nausea, vomiting and seizures. The most serious cases have led to fatal swelling of the lungs or the brain. Damage from brain swelling—exercise-associated hyponatremic encephalopathy (EAHE)—has taken the lives of at least 12 otherwise-healthy people since 1981.
Although Fontaine couldn’t pinpoint why he chose to chug water when he wasn’t thirsty, he knows the fear of dehydration was never far from his mind. Advertisements, event organizers, the reading he did and the people he knew kept telling him to drink more, ultimately to his detriment.
It was finally Saturday morning, the day my four-year-old had been waiting for. The day of her first Highland dance competition, a tangible sign that she had become, in her words, “a real dancer.”
I’ve never been a natural athlete. Most of my genetic gifts were intellectual rather than physical. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the way people move.
This article is for people new to grappling arts or thinking of taking the first step through the door of a gym. The purpose is to not only give you technical insight, but also to put grappling into the larger perspective of human fighting interaction, whether it's based in play or real-life violence.
