The need to hydrate yourself is critical. If you are an athlete, it can literally mean life or death. This is a tragic story of a young girl, whose life ended due to an unbelievably preventable accident.
Terrie Jean Cate died (or as her Mother put it, “was killed”) on August 22, 1992, while undertaking the opening day’s 6-mile training run she had prepared for all summer. It was the inauguration of her freshman soccer season at UC Irvine.
Her Mother has become active in promoting the education of coaches and administrators so that this tragedy is not repeated in the lives of others. One organization that has relayed her message is the National Youth Sports Safety Foundation, based in Needham, Massachusetts.
Heat stroke is an insidious problem and a very real threat that can reach fatal proportions. It is one thing to be active on a hot day, it is quite another to die from it.
Once an athlete is feeling thirsty, the need to hydrate is critical. There is a fine line between maintaining activity while still conscious and struggling along in a state of delirium. By the delirious stage, the athlete will not be capable of reaching the intelligent decision to quit. Someone else must intervene. Apparently, in the case of Terrie Jean Cate, no water was available on the course and no one intervened.
These simple practices should be used by athletes on hot days, especially and implemented by coaches, in charge of young athletes:
Provide fluids (water and electrolyte fluids such as Gatorade)
Provide frequent opportunities to drink
Keep the athletes in view of each other or the coach at all times
Female athletes may be more vulnerable for several reasons, both intrinsic and extrinsic. Many women experience water retention and resort to counter measures such as drinking less, or using diuretics. They must also operate under severe social stresses relating to their body weight. Being slightly dehydrated can lower body weight (although body fat remains the same!) and being lighter can seem like a head start to recording a faster time.
Indeed, the process of storing energy in the muscles requires water, so that a high carbohydrate diet can boost body weight by several pounds (although body fat, again, will be the same). In fact, dehydration of greater than 2% affects the body’s metabolism and will impair performance, especially if you don’t live to reach the finish line.
To quantify this, in round figures, an athletic schoolgirl might weigh around 100 pounds. Some 70% of body weight is water. Therefore, a 2% loss of bodily fluid is tantamount to being a “quart low”, as we tend to say about our car’s motor oil.
Danger levels tend to be slightly greater, perhaps 8-10% i.e., 10 pounds. Any athlete participating in an intensive pre-season regimen can easily lose a few pounds. The important thing to differentiate is how much of this is water and how much is fat. If it is water, the athlete becomes the proverbial “accident waiting for a place to happen.”
That is why well-organized teams, like the Brazilian national men’s soccer team, have a daily weigh-in of their athletes during training camp.
People never guess at what time an urgent situation will happen. Thus, safety officials recommends us to get industrial first aid kits in car, home, office, workplace.
