From the New York Times:
After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk….
Until recently, the condition was all but unheard of because endurance events like marathons and triathlons were populated almost entirely by fast athletes who did not have time to drink too much.
“Elite athletes are not drinking much, and they never have,” Dr. Noakes said.
I always ignored my coaches in college who encouraged me to “stay hydrated”. It never made much sense to me in the first place, being a sprinter, and drinking more than a few swallows of water made me feel like an overloaded boat wallowing through the waves. At an all-day meet when the sun was quite hot, they made us hydrate and I wound up throwing up in between the 200 and the 4×100.
The fact that avoiding the nonexistent dangers of dehydration is actually killing people is just too ironic for words. And to think that we often let science define truth for us!