TriDot Podcast .087

Defeating Dehydration- Perfecting Your Race Day Strategy

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries.  Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain.  We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests.  Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley:  Thanks so much for joining us today!  Would love it if you would take a quick second and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review.  That just helps our show find its way to the ears of new athletes.  Great show today.  We LOVE getting subject area experts onto the show so we can download their knowledge into our triathlete brains, and that is what we have the opportunity to do today as we talk about hydration and electrolyte balance with Andy Blow.

Andy Blow is a Sports Scientist with a degree in Sports Exercise Science from the University of Bath.  An expert in sweat, dehydration, and cramping, Andy has worked with multiple Formula 1 Racing, NBA, NBL, MLB, and Premier League sports teams as well as many professional triathletes.  An elite level triathlete in his younger days, Andy has finished in the top-10 of Ironman events, as well as winning an Xterra World title.

Andy, welcome to the TriDot Podcast!

Andy Blow:  Thanks for having me guys!  Great to be here.

Andrew:  Also joining us is professional triathlete Elizabeth James.  Elizabeth is a USAT Level II and Ironman U Certified Coach who quickly rose through the triathlon ranks using TriDot--from a beginner to top age-grouper to a professional triathlete.   She is a Kona & Boston Marathon Qualifier who has coached triathletes with TriDot since 2014.

Elizabeth, how's it going today?

Elizabeth James: I am doing well.  Thank you so much!

Andrew:  Well, I'm Andrew the average triathlete, voice of the people and captain of the middle of the pack.  As always we'll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our main set topic of hydration, and then wind things down with our cool down.  Lots of good stuff, let's get to it!

Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew:  In the sport of cycling long group rides and well planned club routes often build in a stop at a coffee shop, donut shop, or local cafe for the group to enjoy some conversation and “refuel” before continuing the ride.

Andy, Elizabeth, for today's warm up question, for those occasions where your training group is making a snack stop mid ride, what is your go-to drink and/or snack to order before getting back to the ride?

Andy, let's start with you.

Andy:  Oh, that’s a good one.  I think for me mid ride it’s probably a black coffee, Americana, or something like that.

Andrew:  Okay, nice!

Andy:  And I’m adventurous with the eating so I’ll go for whatever the local freshly baked specialty is.  I’ll try whatever’s on the counter basically and usually by that point my blood sugar is so low that anything tastes fantastic.

Andrew:  Anything tastes good.  Anything helps you get a little jolt of energy before continuing.

Andy:  Yeah.  I think if I had a choice out of all of them though, almond croissant would be the one.

Andrew:  It’s hard to go wrong with an almond croissant that’s for sure. Elizabeth James, what does this look like for you?  When you’re stopping mid ride, what are you stopping to order?

Elizabeth:  Well, for me I kind of went with the answer of it depends on what type of ride we’re doing.  You know, if we’re out for kind of a more social coffee ride then it's a nitro cold brew in the summer or a vanilla latte when it's a little colder--warm up a little bit.  To be honest, and this is really boring, if we’re out on a training ride most of the time I just need a water refill.

Andrew: That is boring!  Booo…

Elizabeth: I usually bring some of my self-serve nutrition.  Those little single-serve packets and I’m mixing drinks in the gas station parking lot.

Andrew:  I’m sure Andy will agree with me that there’s water in coffee.  I mean, there’s already water in it!  You can get coffee.  It doesn’t have to be a pure water refill.

Elizabeth:  Hey!  I gave my coffee answers first.

Andrew:  I’m with Andy on this one.  I’m an Americano guy.  I don’t have an espresso machine at home to make Americanos at home so when I’m at a cafe or a coffee shop an Americano is a nice treat as opposed to just a regular cup of coffee.  Andy, I’m kind of like you on the food as well.  I’m down to try what’s there.  They always have the display case with their pastries.  I’m down for whatever pastry is there in the window.

Hey guys, we want to hear from you on this.  Maybe you’ve got a favorite smoothie shop that you guys stop at.  Maybe you’ve got a coffee drink that Andy, Elizabeth, and I have not mentioned.  Make sure you are a part of the I Am TriDot Facebook Group.  We post these warm up questions out every single Monday when the show airs and find this question.  When your training group stops in the middle of a group ride, what is that go-to drink that you like to order?

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

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Andrew:  Hydration can play a huge role in our ability to get the most out of ourselves on race day.  Likewise, it’s a lot easier to get through a tough training session, a hot training session, or a long training session when you are properly hydrated.  And since every athlete sweats different amounts, in different disciplines,  in different environments it can be difficult for each of us to determine exactly how much of what we should be drinking and when.  That is where Andy Blow steps in to save the day, and talk us through the science of hydration.  So Andy, before we get to the salty, hydration science goodness I would love to just hear a little bit more about your own triathlon career.  How did you get started in the sport as an athlete in the first place?

Andy:  I got into triathlon a long time ago in the mid ‘90s.  I was a teenager then, a young teenager.  I had done a bit of swimming, a bit of cross country, and played a lot of soccer as all kids do in the UK...and so I’m told an increasing number of kids in the US as well now.  I guess the talent scouts pointed out that I was faster and better at running without a ball at my feet than with one.  You know, it was not a good look for me running with the ball. So I did better at cross country and that kind of thing.  My dad took me along to do a biathlon.  It would be called an aquathon now I think, but it was a swim run and it was a kid’s/teenager’s event alongside an adult triathlon.  I did that and enjoyed it.  Basically I remember seeing all the tri-spoke wheels and the cool fluorescent bikes and that kind of thing and thought I’d fancy a go with that and badgered my dad to buy me a bike.  I think he spent what the equivalent would be of literally 20 bucks on a second hand road bike from my cousin which had a 53 chainring which you couldn’t change down from. So it made my legs strong.  And that was me hooked basically and I was in. Then triathlon gradually became an obsession really for a long time.

Andrew:  That happens very quickly doesn’t it?

Andy:  It does.

Andrew:  I mean, it just takes one race.  It takes a couple training rides.  It takes one piece of cool gear and you’re hooked from there.

Andy:  It gets out of hand, yeah.  I used to get the...we have in the UK 220 Triathlon Magazine which was kind of the underground UK magazine that used to be delivered to my door.  I still have all the old copies.  I have boxes of them at home which my wife is like, “When are we going to throw this junk out?”  Never!

Andrew: Never.

Andy: Yeah, exactly!  I also used to order in--the news agent would used to get me and it would come like two months after publication--the Triathlete Mag with Scott Tinley and Dave Scott and all of the tri guys from the US.  So yeah, that was how I used to get my fix.  Then I would also get a VHS video cassette each year about a month late of the NBC coverage of Kona.

Andrew:  You know, you get hooked into the sport and you get really good at it.  You become an elite at the sport for sure and you’ve got top ten finishes at multiple Ironman events, multiple trips to Kona over your career, and an Xterra age group championship.  From all of those accomplishments, what are maybe a few of the top race moments you are most proud of?

Andy:  I did love doing Xterra in Maui.  That was cool.  I raced with a friend of mine.  He was a little bit younger than me and we just fell on either side of the age brackets which was nice because he raced in what was like the junior 18 to 20-whatever and I was I think 20-24 or whatever the bracket was and we both won our age groups. And we were really close in the race as well.  So that was an awesome experience.  I loved that! That was 21 years ago now; that was in 2000.  So it is going back a while.  And we won a helicopter trip around Maui as the prize.

Andrew:  Oh so cool!

Andy:  It was really cool.  And that was brilliant.  Then my best out and out performance probably came...I was third at Half Ironman UK one year which would be called 70.3 now, but obviously we just used to call it Half Ironman.  And there was this pretty decent pro field in that race and that was back in the days when age groupers and pros took off together so you had a fair shot to just kind of like the best man win and I was racing age group but came off the bike in about 8th and ran through to 3rd.  I remember one of the finish guys...I think he had been top ten in Kona a couple of times...he sort of like tapped me on the shoulder and afterwards was like, “Why are you not racing professional?  You could have won some money today!”  It was at that point, that was when I sort of decided that I’d have a few. And I had a couple of years there when I did some pro races after that.

Elizabeth:  Gosh, that’s awesome!  Now, I’ve personally never done an Xterra Race, but they look just insanely fun.

Andrew:  Big deal!

Elizabeth:  I mean, kind of a fun way to mix it up from your normal road racing. Did you find Xterra to be a huge departure from the road racing of Ironman or was it a similar challenge in just a different venue?

Andy:  I reckon back in 2000 it was starting to be a bit of a specialist discipline.  So you were getting guys...I think Michael Tobin was racing back then and he was like the guy who specialized in Xterra, but there were also a lot of us that were doing both sports.  I don’t reckon the transition or the change from road triathlon to Xterra was quite as harsh because there weren’t so many people who were so awesome on the mountain bike and awesome at trail running.  It was kind of triathletes coming across a few mountain bikers, but they couldn’t swim so they were all playing catch up.  And I was lucky because I had done a bit of mountain bike racing and that sort of thing just for fun before it.  So the transition for me I thought was not too bad and it was a lot of fun.  The biggest challenge with it, I suppose at the time, was almost just the financial cost of maintaining a really good mountain bike and your road bike and your TT bike and all that.  You always break mountain bikes and you have to have different tires for every sort of different course and there’s all that technical stuff.  But I think overall it wasn’t as--even back then--it wasn’t quite as hyper specialized as it is now.  Because if you want to get on the sharp end of Xterra now you’ve got to be doing Xterra really and I suppose what may be rose-tinted, but I look back and think it was nice when you could kind of flip between the two and do them for fun.

Elizabeth:  So in all of these experiences from your racing career, is that kind of what led you to study the science of hydration?  What were you going through out on the course that sparked that desire to study this?

Andy:  Yeah, that was definitely the case.  Obviously in the UK we’re not like Texas.  You know, it’s cold here most of the time and I’m happy in that temperature. Not day-to-day, I actually quite like…

Andrew:  And Andy, sorry to interrupt you, but we do have quite a few TriDot Ambassadors and TriDot athletes that train with us that are based in the UK.

Andy:  Okay, cool!

Andrew:  Just a quick shoutout to them!  I hope they’re enjoying hearing someone from their homeland on the podcast instead of all of us Texans just talking about the sport for once.  So, super happy to have you on.  Shoutout to our UK ambassadors.

Andy:  Yeah, well they’ll know what I’m talking about.  We don’t mind going out in shorts in low temperatures and that kind of thing.  So I was used to that.  I was kind of used to racing in cooler conditions and it rarely presented a problem with me, you know hydration and that kind of thing.  A great example is going to Maui and doing Xterra which is like a three and a bit hour race and on the run I remember my quads just locking up some of the way.  Luckily I had had a good bike section and had a bit of a lead in terms of my competition to get through.  But that was so regular for me, just bombing out in really long, hot races because of cramps and because of just feeling like someone had pulled my power cable out on the lengthy stages.  It took me a number of years.  Obviously as you do as an athlete you start looking under all the rocks and trying to figure out what is going on here and it was definitely not energy, it was something else.  A friend of mine who was a doctor put me onto the idea of salt lost in sweat.  I have a high sweat rate; you can see that when I’m working out.  I was on the trainer for just 35 minutes this morning doing a short session before work and I think I lost--I’m going to have to convert this to pounds as well--but it was like 600 grams or 700 grams which is like a pound and a bit just in 30 minutes on the trainer of sweat, easy.  Also, I lose lots of salt and that was something that I didn’t realize at the time and that was something that my friend who was a doctor pointed out to me and he said, “It looks like you’re losing a lot of salt and hence you should get a sweat test.”  And I was like, “Okay, what’s one of those?”  And that’s kind of where it all starts really.  Then I started looking into this, understanding sweat and sodium loss, understanding that I had really quite exceptionally high sweat and sodium losses, and the way I was attacking replacing them was just not working.  So then it was sort of reverse engineering that to figure out what do I need to take, adjusting my race plan dramatically, and low and behold--I always said to people it was like night and day when I had figured it out.  There’s very few things often in training, as you guys well know, that are like magic bullets.  But occasionally there’s something where it’s like someone flips a switch.  When I got that part of the puzzle right for me it was a game changer completely.

Andrew:  Before you discovered that and before you were able to flip that switch, what was your hydration strategy before?  Then once you started doing the sweat tests and learning about yourself and actively trying to replace more while you were racing...what did you change to remedy the situation further into your career?

Andy:  Embarrassingly my attitude towards it early on was kind of more is better especially if it’s hot.  So I would just drink as much as I could really.  I would just keep drinking because my assumption was dehydration is going to topple me so I just need to keep smashing the drinks in--water, Gatorade, whatever’s being given out I’m going to drink it.  I would get very washed out.  I would really just dilute my body down as a result and I think that’s still surprisingly and frighteningly common today.  People when it gets hot--if you’re not used to racing in the heat--and it is true, I don’t want to set the scene here that if it’s hot you don’t need to drink a lot.  You probably do need to drink a lot, but there is a limit.  And I overstepped that limit.  I was pounding in way more water than was necessary, suffering a dip in performance, and then doubling down on a bad strategy by drinking even more.  The first time I really did that properly was in Ironman Switzerland which was in 2000.  I went into that race, I was in great shape that year.  I can’t remember if it was before or after, but I had won the Xterra or was going to win the Xterra World age group and was racing really fast.  So I was in great shape and it wasn’t ridiculous to think I was going to shoot for nine hours or something around that mark and I ended up doing I think between 10-½ and 11 and walking most of the run.  You know, it was awful.  It was absolutely awful.  It was a hot year and I just drank and drank and drank.  I was peeing and peeing on the run.  It was horrid.  So it was just embarrassingly at that point, I didn’t have a strategy.

Andrew:  So growing up, Elizabeth and I both have soccer in our backgrounds, you know playing youth soccer, high school soccer.  My high school soccer coach--I grew up in central Florida, another hot state, a really humid state and our coach would always tell us on game day “Just drink water.  I want you coming into the game hydrated.  That last potty break before the game you better be having clear pee. I don’t want to see any color in that. I want it to be clear.  That means you’re hydrated.”  And that’s what we were told as kids.  So I would go--same thing when I had tennis matches as a kid, soccer games as a kid.  I would take to school with me five, six water bottles and try to drink an entire water bottle every single period in school.  The mentality for me was “Oh, it’s really hot outside, I’m in Florida. I need to show up to this game hydrated. I need to show up to this game with enough fluid in my system.”  And all I was ever drinking was water.  I wish looking back...because I’m kind of like you Andy.  I'm an athlete that suffers in the heat...I sweat a lot.  I sweat a lot of sodium when I sweat.  So looking back there was some hot tennis matches and some hot soccer games where I struggled and you just think it’s fitness. You just think its “Oh, I’m wearing out. It’s a hot day.”  And it’s like, no something could have been done about that if I had had somebody in my life that knew a little bit more and could have educated us or if we had a coach that knew the importance of salt and sodium. So kind of further into your career was it taking more sodium out on the course that helped you race stronger?

Andy:  It was first of all quantifying what I was losing and sitting down with Dr. Juttley who’s the doctor who pointed this out.  We built a very simple little spreadsheet, worked out roughly what I was losing, and the delta between what I was taking in and what I was losing was huge.  I was maybe taking a couple hundred milligrams of sodium an hour or something and I was losing like 2000 milligrams of sodium an hour.

Andrew:  Wow!

Elizabeth:  Big difference!

Andy:  So he was like we need to sort of at least 5X this to get anywhere close and also drink less.  I basically had a bit more of a strategy around...I say a strategy back then, it was trial and error.  I sort of dialed it back a bit on the fluid intake and turned up the volume massively on the sodium.  For me it ended up being between 1000 and 1500 mg of sodium for every hour on the bike in an Ironman and I would then kind of adjust on the run.  And everything sort of like clicked at that point. That was the kind of missing ingredient for me.  I don’t want to come across like an evangelist like that is the case for everyone because it is very individual.  But I think one of the things, like you were saying, the education in this space has been lacking for a while and there’s a lot of contradictory stuff out there.  A lot of people have different opinions. This sort of perceived wisdom is all over the place and that confusion leads to people either switching off and not bothering to engage with the issue or following an erroneous path.  Really it comes down to, with the hydration side of things, just knowing your numbers.  Knowing roughly how many fluid ounces or liters of sweat you lose per hour in different conditions, roughly how many milligrams of sodium you lose, and then based on the duration of the activity it’s what kind of percentage of that am I aiming to replace.  There’s no hard and fast rules with that.  It’s wrong to replace 0% and I would argue it’s wrong to try to strive to replace 100% and probably you're in this sort of 50, 60, 70% range is a good place to start. But it depends on lots of individual factors.  I think that considering these, that’s how analytical a lot of triathletes are with lots of aspects of performance.  People these days can tell you their FTP, their drag coefficient, their power to weight ratio, you know all these kind of things.  But if they can’t tell you how much fluid, salt, and arguably as well how many grams of carbohydrate they need to consume an hour they’re missing a huge trick because those three nutritional fundamentals are the bedrock of doing a good long distance race.

Andrew:  Yeah, and we’ll spend thousands on aero parts for our bikes that save us a minute on race day when we could spend a whole lot less than that just to get the sodium right and probably save minutes as well.  Andy, from your research you’ve co-authored several studies and books on electrolyte replenishment.  Once you made the decision to study hydration, what kinds of things were you doing in your research and what did those early days of testing with athletes look like?

Andy:  A lot of the actual papers that we’ve published have been in conjunction with medics and with researchers because I’ve got that sports science background.  I would not say I’m an out and out research scientist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a practical, applied guy. A lot of the stuff that I’ve done is being practical and applied.  It’s working with athletes.  Essentially observation or recording of what they’re eating and drinking, working out the basics.  To simplify we boil it down to liters or fluid ounces of fluid, grams of carbohydrate, and milligrams of sodium and then manipulating that.  We did various studies to begin with like taking large cohorts of athletes, measuring their sweat losses, measuring their sodium losses to get a handle on what those ranges look like.  Rather than the published ranges out there in the literature we wanted to get specific data on groups of athletes that we were working with. So we did a lot of that stuff and we continued to build on that.  We sweat tested over, I think, 10,000 athletes now.  So we’ve got a pretty substantial database.  And what’s interesting is a lot of that data agrees with what’s been published as well in different studies.  It sort of tends to suggest that as long as the methodologies are vaguely comparable, the numbers that we get from our sweat testing are pretty robust when it comes to being applicable to what athletes do.  The interesting thing about all of this; the research, the data, and the numbers is, people often think that with all of that power of data and information you can then boil it back down to being really highly specific per individual.  But I would argue, we always use this analogy where what you’re trying to do is work out your--if this was clothing it’s your t-shirt size.  It’s like are you a small, a medium, a large, or an extra large guy or girl when it comes to fluid and salt.  And I’m like XL when it comes to salt and probably L to XL when it comes to fluid.  But you get sometimes people who are small for fluid and XL for salt.  Or you get people who are small for salt and XL for fluid. There’s all these different permutations; everything you could imagine.  So a lot of what we’ve done with athletes is trying to take all that information and say, “Okay, there’s loads of numbers here, there’s loads of data, but what can we boil it down to that’s actionable for someone?”  And really what that comes down to is what strength of electrolyte drink is likely to benefit you given your physiology and your circumstances and how much of it do you need to drink?  That’s the fundamentals.

Elizabeth:  Awesome!  You mentioned the number of sweat tests that you’ve done here.

Andrew:  Over 10,000 Elizabeth!

Elizabeth:  Right!  You’ve had a chance to work with so many professional athletes from a variety of sports, including some pro triathletes.  What does that relationship look like once you partner with a team or an athlete?  What happens when you work together?

Andy:  It could be loads of different forms.  With professional sports teams we sometimes consult with them.  So we basically go in and work with the backroom staff.  We will work with their athletic trainers or their sports scientists or their nutritionists or doctors.  We might deploy sweat testing with the athletes in the team to get their sweat rates and get their sweat sodium levels and then kind of hand that information off for them to work out their protocols within them.  We’re doing that at the moment in pro cycling with Team DSM who are a pro tour cycling team that we’re partnered with and we work very closely with their nutritionists.  They sweat test all their riders and they’ve got their own kind of interesting system where they green, amber, red people.  So that’s cool I think because they say the green people have reduced or relatively low fluid and salt needs and they have a protocol that they follow which is fairly relaxed.  The amber people, they need to be a bit more on it and the red people really have to focus on getting their intake right in that area.  So we will consult with people like that within the teams and organizations.  We sell them the equipment and train them how to do it and off they go and they just run with it.  If we’re working with individual athletes, increasingly what we’ll do is we will take a lot of physiological measurements from them around their sweat rate, their sweat sodium, maybe look at their current nutritional intake in races and kind of try to basically take whatever system they’ve got and assess whether it’s working or not.  Then we look at which...we call them the three levers--carbs, fluid, salt--and try to pull those levers accurately with them until they get it set in their head what they need to be doing.  Ultimately if we do that job well we end up creating athletes who leave with a good understanding of what they need to do and how to adapt it in different circumstances rather than us having to tell them what to do the whole time.  Because, Elizabeth, you could be racing in Texas one week and you might go up into northern California another week and it’s a lot colder.  You need to be able to adapt that plan, what you’re going to do, based on experience and feel and that sort of thing.  So we try to give people the tools to do that.

Elizabeth:  I just love that.  I think that’s one of the things that I noticed right away, just from your website, is the focus on education.  It’s not just “Here’s what you do.”  It’s “Here’s the science behind why and let’s look at what you’re losing. Let's look at how we can replace this.How can we adapt it?”  And as you mentioned as you’re working with a team or an athlete there’s a big educational component to that.  I just love that.  That makes me excited!  I’m a former teacher as well, so that makes my teacher heart very happy.

Andy:  Yes.  It’s something that a lot of other companies in our space don’t tend to focus on because they see themselves, I think, primarily as product brands or something like that.  We have products that we sell, but we started out consulting with athletes.  So it’s in our DNA to educate and try to solve performance related problems.  We obviously focus pretty heavily on the niche of hydration and we have products that can work for some people.  I think over the years we’ve hopefully got increasingly better at being very transparent with people.  We consult with athletes sometimes and the end result is “Look, you really don’t need to work with us or use our products.”  There is a bit of an over reliance, I think, in sport these days on that you need a specialist product or a specialist technology to do absolutely everything for you.  What we figured out after a while is where we’ve got people who are doing long, hot events especially people who have big sweat rates and that sort of thing, we’ve got a phenomenal suite of education and tools that can work with them.  But where we’ve got people who are running 5K in cool conditions and that and they’re just a bit new and nervous and all the rest, we can give them some pointers, but they don’t need to really--what we’re doing is not going to uncork an outstanding performance for them. It’s kind of trying to find our little niches within sports and work with them.  One thing that amazed me early on we started doing a lot of work with major league baseball and I thought--my perception because I’m a Brit I don’t really understand baseball, I didn’t understand baseball until I got out there.  I thought, “These guys, this isn’t a big sweat sport.”

Andrew: They just stand there!

Andy:  Exactly!  They just stand around, chewing tobacco, and that’s about it.  But then I went to Jacksonville to one of the minor league baseball teams there in the summer and I stood out on the field watching the catchers practicing and that kind of thing.  And I’m standing there and all I’m doing is standing there and my shirt is dripping and there’s sweat in my eyes and the catcher takes his thing off and literally like--he had long hair--he like wrings his hair out of sweat and as he wrings this I’m like, “I can understand how this might apply in this sport.”  So it’s kind of figuring out when we do a baseball team there’s a subset of athletes we’re going to focus on.  And it’s going to be relevant there than it probably is in Boston in the autumn.

Elizabeth:  So I’m curious now.  At what point in your journey as a scientist and a specialist in this field did you begin Precision Hydration--launching the company dedicated to helping athletes have better training and racing?

Andy: Well, I stopped competing--I started to fizzle out of competing around 2005-2006 something like that.  I was already working with athletes in sport science, providing sport science support and coaching.  Then with another guy we were running a sport science lab and we sort of bolted the sweat testing in, because it’s something I had learned in my racing career.  I thought we can bolt this into our offering at the lab because no one is doing it.  So we bought the sweat testing equipment and it was at that point that we started to realize that maybe this warrants a bit more focus in and of itself. I think between 2006 and 2010 it sort of went through different iterations until we actually decided this needs to be its own business.  We set up Precision Hydration in 2011 formally.  So we are 10 years old this year and it’s just then been a gradual…

Andrew:  Happy anniversary!  Happy birthday!

Elizabeth:  Yeah, congratulations!

Andy:  We should have a big party this year.  It’s just been a gradual evolution from there.  We introduced our first products towards the back end of that first year, but predominantly early on our business was kept alive by consulting with athletes and that kind of thing.  We weren’t a big product sales business and then it’s gradually...it’s morphed over the years and changed.  But we still do a lot of--before COVID hit I was on the road 30 to 40% of the time doing sweat testing.  So it's still a big part of what we do.

Andrew:  Let’s talk about those sweat tests because we’ve alluded to it a few times. We’ve talked about it a few times. We talked about the importance of it a few times.  I love that in your DNA as a company you talked about how applicable your research it is and how hands on you are with athletes just by default of what you’re studying.  So for athletes out there who are like, “Okay great.  I’m buying into this.  I hear this. I want to get sweat tested.”  How do these sweat tests work and what can an athlete find out by doing one?

Andy:  The traditional way of getting a sweat test is to stick absorbent patches on the body and then you go for a run or you go for a ride.  You have someone take those patches off, they kind of put them into a syringe, squeeze it out, and then analyze it.  There are lots of different methods you can use. You can use some sort of flame photometer, you can use a mass spectrometer.  It’s a lab-based kit that analyzes the electrolyte content.  We use something a bit different.  We use something that stimulates the sweat glands in the arm.  So an electrical impulse puts a chemical into the skin which stimulates your sweat glands locally and the advantage of that is it produces a fairly controlled sweat rate. When you go and exercise even in the heat it takes you 10 or 15 minutes to start sweating fully.  So this induces sweating within five minutes.  We collect the sweat with a very controlled plastic collection device and then we have a desktop analyzer that reads the conductivity of the sweat and converts that into the electrolyte component. End-to-end you can get a sweat test done with our stuff in 20 minutes.  So it has a lot of advantages.  You can also get your sweat rate by just doing a session on the trainer or treadmill or even weighing yourself before and after a run or a bike ride.  Then you put those two pieces of information together and you get a sweat test report.  On the day if you can’t even do your sweat rate measurement you can always estimate that and still get a report.  Because like I said, what we’re trying to do is fit you into this small, medium, large, extra large bucket.  We’re not too worried if your sweat rate is a little bit higher or a little bit lower. It’s getting it in the right ballpark. The only downside to doing a test that way is it involves going somewhere, visiting someone with the equipment or them coming to see you.  We’ve gradually over the years built a network of test centers.  I think we have like 20-some places in the US now that you can get a sweat test and a number in the UK obviously.  Some in Australia, a few in continental Europe.

Andrew:  I actually became aware of Precision Hydration kind of organically a few months ago.  I was training toward Ironman Texas.  I was using a different electrolyte product before, but I went on the website and you guys have a great soft test.  It’s kind of a questionnaire that asks you a couple of questions.  “Do you notice stinging in your eyes during workouts?  Do you notice patches of sweat on your clothing after workouts or sessions or races?”  So you answer 10 or 12 questions and it kind of points you in the direction of which Precision Hydration products might be the best fit for you. So I went through the questionnaire. No shock to me, it told me that I’m a salty sweater.  It told me that I probably sweat a lot and so it recommended the most powerful Precision Hydration mix, the 1500.  So I ordered some and Andy, I was using it in training and felt great with it, was really enjoying it.  I planned on using it on race day Ironman Texas.  That was kind of my route.  Elizabeth I know you kind of went through that questionnaire as well.  What was your experience there?

Elizabeth:  Yes, yeah I did.  I know that I am a heavy sweater, but don’t lose a lot of salt just from other testing that I had done previously.  Just even in that questionnaire and the education that’s there on the website it confirmed that too that yes, I have a very high sweat rate; don’t lose a lot of salt. So my recommendations were a little bit different than Andrew’s.  I didn’t need as much of that sodium replacement, but in terms of being on the nose with recommendations for during training, before the race, during the race, after the race I just loved how it was all outlined there for athletes.  I thought that was fantastic.

Andy:  Yeah, we’ve had a lot of people go through that test online now and we get a lot of feedback so that algorithm that sits behind it is tweaked periodically to try to take advantage of the feedback that we get.  I think over the years it has become better and better as a tool.  Hopefully it comes across--it’s only ever badged as a tool to get you in the right zone for then you to fine tune.  It’s a bit like having an experienced bike fitter kind of say to you, “Oh, saddle needs to go up a bit and the bars need to go down a bit.”  You know this and that.  Then you get the allen keys in your hand and you go and figure it out on a ride or two.  And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.  The ballpark for trial and error with hydration is very, very wide and what that test tries to do is zone in on which quarter of that park you’re playing in and hopefully that saves a whole lot of time and heartache for people. Because as you said, Andrew, if you had had this information when you were playing soccer as a youngster it would have probably helped.  It certainly would have helped me going back 15 or 20 years ago.

Andrew:  Yep.  So for me the Precision Hydration mix that I was buying, the 1500, two sachets of that in a bottle was about 600 to 700 more grams of sodium than the product I was using beforehand.  And so on race day that’s just a lot more I am able to take in per hour and I was excited about how that would help me at Ironman Texas.  Andy, you mentioned it’s important to know both the sodium concentration in our sweat and then our rate at which we sweat.  Talk to us a little bit about the difference between these two metrics and kind of the implications they have for our hydration needs.

Andy:  To a degree sweat rate, which is the amount of fluid that you lose per hour, and sweat sodium concentration are somewhat independent variables.  So you can sweat a lot as Elizabeth is saying she does, but with a low concentration of salt.  Or you can sweat a lot as I do with a high concentration of salt.  The fluid volume loss can become a problem for anyone even if you’ve got low salt losses.  Because at the end of the day there’s only so much dehydration your body can tolerate and only so much loss of fluid you can tolerate from your blood stream before your blood gets thicker, the cardiovascular strain on your body increases, and you just can’t perform at your best.  I’m sure you’ve seen in the heat, if you’ve ever used a heart rate monitor and a power meter or if you’re running on a treadmill and you see this point at which your heart rate and your power or your speed decouple; so you were running along or say you were riding along at 140 beats per minute and that’s 200 watts and then all of a sudden you’re getting thirsty and your heart rate is going up to 160, but you’re still at 200 watts.  Then it’s 165, then it’s 170 and that’s a sign that your blood is getting thicker and that you’re dehydrating because your heart is having to work harder to perfuse all of the tissues.

Andrew:  Yeah, super interesting!

Andy:  There are other reasons why your heart rate might drift; core body temperature rising and stuff, but it’s kind of all in the mix with getting dehydrated makes it worse.  So pure fluid loss on its own can be a problem.  Pure salt loss on its own can be a problem.  Then with sweat we get the combination of the two.  The devil in the detail is then figuring out, okay well based on those two, what’s the best ratio for me to replace.  The limiting factor you're up against generally is that there’s kind of a ceiling on how much fluid and salt you can absorb per hour and often that’s quoted as being about a liter or 32 ounces per hour for most people. So what we try and do is calibrate people’s thinking first of all is to how much fluid is this and it might be 300 or 500 mL of fluid, like 12 to 16 ounces, if you’re on the lower side of the sweating spectrum.  It might be 24 ounces, 750 mL, if you’re kind of moderate normal.  And it might be 24 to 32, 34 ounces even if you’re a heavy sweater and it’s hot.  But that’s where a bit of practice comes in with the fluid bit.  Then the ratio of sodium that you take in with that is linked a little bit to your sweat sodium losses, but also like in Elizabeth’s case, it might be that in a long race you tweak the amount of sodium up as well just because over a long period of time even with a low sweat sodium and a high sweat rate then the total amount of sodium you’re going to lose is quite high. Often, although it’s a dangerous thing to say to athletes because athletes think more is better with everything, a little bit more sodium sometimes in a race or in a hard session is perhaps better than not enough.  That statement needs a massive caveat to say that doesn’t mean more is better all the time.  It just means if you overshoot by 10% you’re probably better off than under shooting.

Elizabeth:  Yeah and you know, as we’ve been talking about getting in the right zone there and some of the products that you have--I know we’ve mentioned the 1500 a couple times just in kind of what Andrew and I went through in terms of our educational piece from the website.  A lot of hydration companies in the marketplace right now really have their line of product with a specific formula and it has a certain fixed amount of sodium or electrolyte replacement.  And your approach is a little bit different in finding out what the athlete is actually losing in their sweat and then there are different products with different salt concentrations.  How did you land on that approach?  What benefit have you seen for athletes with having the variety of products?

Andy:  I think it came about because we were focused primarily on solving a problem for athletes rather than making it convenient for the commercial goals of the business.  Because if you want to design a product to sell with anything, constraining the variables is the first thing.  So it’s great for a company if they can produce one drink and sell it to everyone. Then obviously that’s really easy from a manufacturing, logistics, and marketing point of view.  And this was the old way things were done in every sphere really.  People would invent something, market it as like the best, tell you all the features of it and what it’s going to do for you, and then kind of put it out there and champion it.  The way everything appears to be moving, I think we were a relatively early mover in this ten years ago in the nutrition hydration space, is that actually when you get towards the pointier end of performance the individual variation from person to person starts to matter a lot more.  Why give everyone a super, super high dose of sodium which in the long run could be challenging for their body and unhealthy for them if what they need is a lot less than that?  And vice versa.  Why give everyone a pretty weak drink when some of them, like myself and Andrew, need a particularly strong one?  So it was nothing more fancy than that.

Andrew: Well, and it speaks to us because at TriDot we custom tailor the training plan to every single athlete.  I mean, my training is very different from Elizabeth’s training which would be very different from your training if you were using TriDot Andy. So it speaks to us for sure and is definitely an appeal.  One question I had; we’ve talked a lot about the importance of sodium in these different concentrations you have there’s the 1500, the 1000, and the 500.  There’s different amounts of sodium.  Does the balance of sodium to potassium, magnesium, etcetera--does that matter in an electrolyte product or is salt just salt as long as you’re getting enough of it?

Andy:  If you want the simple answer, salt is just salt and if you’re getting enough that’s the main thing.  Because what you sweat out is sodium chloride and sodium is the important bit for fluid balance, so that matters.  A lot of electrolyte drinks including ours contain potassium, magnesium, and calcium in amounts that are plausible for the average person to lose in their sweat and the general feeling on that within sports science I think at the moment is that there’s not a lot of harm in replacing those at sensible levels that are equivalent to what you lose.  But the advantages are less clear.  So the amount of potassium for example or calcium or magnesium that you lose in your sweat is relatively tiny compared to the amount of sodium.  Most of us aren’t exercising, even if you’re doing a heavy amount of Ironman training, we’re not exercising for long enough at any one time to seriously deplete the other electrolytes like we can with sodium.  And it even goes as far as like manual labor and that kind of thing.  The 1500 parts, we have a bunch of guys in Texas funny enough who install roofing insulation in people’s attics and things.  They just drink this stuff all day long and say how much better it makes them feel because those guys just sweat all day at work every day.  From talking to them it’s way harder than training for an Ironman what they do.  We work in the occupational health in Australia with people who mend the railroads out there and provide the guys out there--because it’s basically like Florida conditions out there--and we provide them with sweat testing and with electrolyte products for when they’re out working long shifts welding rail track or whatever because it’s hard work in the sun.  So however you’re losing that sweat and that sodium it needs replacing and it needs replacing in some sort of proportion to the amount that you lose.

Andrew:  If an athlete, they go to the website and do the questionnaire that Elizabeth and I did, or maybe just by weighing themselves, noticing salt on their kit during training sessions.  Maybe they already know that they’re a relatively salty sweater, or they can go to the website, they can find a place nearby where they live that does the actual sweat tests that you described.  Once we know that about ourselves; once we kind of know like you said the ballpark of what range we need to fall in--small, medium, large, extra large--what advice do you have for athletes as they start to actually craft their race day hydration strategy?

Andy:  I would say the first place always to look is what have you done that has come close to working or has worked in the past because that’s a really good indication.  Because most athletes have got some successful races behind them.  It might not be all their races, but especially if they’re building up to a long course race.  So look back at what has worked for you and use that as a template.  Then I would say take the information from the testing and sort of overlay that and say, “If I’m a guy who’s got a big sweat rate and a big sodium consumption and generally I’ve done okay, but I have faded a bit in the heat.  My sodium consumption has been 500 mg an hour.”  The natural thing there is to obviously dial that up and dial it up in proportion to whatever the test recommends and then the important thing is go out and do your brick sessions, your big, long, hard training sessions and actually test it out for real.  I do think that not enough athletes do enough simulation training sessions where they simulate their race hydration and nutrition as well as the effort.  So a lot of people will go out and do a long hard ride and a run off the back of it, but they won’t necessarily really simulate their race intake.  And that does two things--t trains your body and it trains your gut to handle and tolerate whatever you’re taking on race day and it also provides you some pretty strong feedback as to whether what you’re doing is right.  Then it’s a bit like being a detective.  If it doesn’t work in certain ways you tweek and test it. Someone who’s been really good at this actually--we don’t sponsor him so there’s no business link--but I’ve talked a lot with Tim Reid who is the Ironman 70.3 World Champion.  Tim has a huge sweat rate and he has always talked about that being a limiting factor for him in Kona.  And he just does these huge simulation training sessions a few weeks out for every Ironman and tweeks his sodium, his fluids, and tries to do it in the right conditions and things.  He’s quite vocal about it.  He posted one on Instagram not long ago about his session before, I think he’s training up for Ironman Caines as we record this.  I’ve always been impressed with his approach because he has got an issue to solve here because he is losing a huge amount of fluid and sodium, but he is very organized and diligent about the way he prepares and simulates what he is going to do in races and training.  So I would say that’s the key thing for athletes is to really focus on learning from experience and not leaving it to chance on the day.

Andrew:  So Andy, we are kindred spirits--Precision Hydration and TriDot--because any athlete building towards their A race particularly if it is a 70.3 or a full Ironman, in their training program two weeks out and four weeks out they will have a race rehearsal and that workout is, it depends on the person, but it’s almost the entire mileage of the ride with a 40 minute run off the bike and we encourage athletes to use that not only as a training session to complete that distance, that duration, but we also encourage people to use the kit you plan on wearing on race day, use the shoes, use the socks, use that time to experiment with the calories you’re taking in, the salt you’re taking in.  Do I need to take more or less?  How did I feel towards the end of the session?  Actually podcast episode 76 for us was called “Rock Your Next Race Rehearsal.” It’s just an hour of our coaches talking about how to maximize those sessions.  So exactly what you’re talking about.  We encourage athletes to do that.  Guys, see here, it’s not just us.  Here’s another expert in the field encouraging you to do the same thing.

Andy:  Yep.  Practice makes perfect.

Elizabeth:  Yes, yeah!.  Kind of going back a little bit to looking at what’s going well, what’s working, let’s talk a little bit about what that would feel like.  So we’re out on the race course.  We’ve done the swim.  We’ve transitioned.  Now we’ve got the bike and the run.  How should we kind of feel out there if we know that we’re getting our hydration right? Maybe what are some signs that we would be dehydrating or over hydrating?  What should athletes be looking for in terms of how they feel?

Andy:  I think in a triathlon once you’ve cleared the swim and once you’ve got a few minutes into the bike ride, it can be tough to assess your body in the first 10 or 15 minutes on the bike in a long course race because you’ve been in the water a long time and it is a weird feeling getting upright, getting going again on the bike.  What I would definitely say on the bike is that...thirst.  Your body is wired to tell you when you’re thirsty when you’re starting to dehydrate.  You want to be monitoring the body when you can, but early on in a long race I’m quite in favor of people following a predetermined plan.  You want to be thinking in the first hour I want to be getting X amount of bottles or a bottle in or whatever it is.  Then going on from there, the deeper you get into the race I think the more flexible your plan needs to become.  So you might set out and say, “As a minimum, I’m going to get one bottle per hour of my hydration fluid in during the first two hours.” And then by then the race is settling down and you’re a bit more chilled and you’re able to start thinking about how you feel and you might decide to increase your intake at that point. Signs that you might want to increase your intake are just plain old you’re feeling thirsty.  Thirst is the main one for dehydration so that’s what would drive an increase in intake.  You just feel like you need more fluid.  Food isn’t going down very well, you want to wash it down, you’re craving liquids.  If though, you get two or three hours in and already your stomach’s feeling a bit bloated, maybe you’ve already peed, or something like that; maybe that’s a sign that your fluid intake has been a bit too aggressive and it’s time to settle down and back it off.  Be targeted early on and listen to your body and read the signs later.  A big sign for me that I was starting to get low on the salts was bloating in the stomach, but also little crampy spasms in my muscles.  So if anyone regularly gets cramps they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about because you tend to get this kind of “Oh no, it’s coming!” kind of feeling and the muscles will start tightening up.

Andrew:  Kind of the little twinges.

Andy:  Yeah.  And that for me was a sign, it was like right...more salt.  More sodium at that point and that could often keep it at bay.

Andrew:  So you mentioned cramping just a little bit ago and any athlete that has experienced race day cramps they know just how much an ill timed cramp can really knock you off your pace.  I’ve heard a number of different theories and angles on people suggesting why we cramp in training and racing.  From your research, is cramping usually induced by dehydration or can it also be a muscle fatigue problem?

Andy:  That’s the sort of debate that has been going on for a number of years now in sport science: what causes muscle cramps?  It was definitely perceived that it was a dehydration and electrolyte imbalance problem many years ago.  That theory has persisted and I still believe it has merit because it is very difficult to prove in a lab and there’s not many studies that have really shown much scientific evidence behind it.  That being said, there is an unbelievable wealth of anecdotal evidence, observational evidence to suggest that athletes who lose a lot of salt and a lot of fluid cramp more than those that don’t.  To sort of resolve that, it’s a pretty easy test.  You take more salt and/or more fluid and we’ve got a protocol on our website, we’ve got a big blog on cramping that helps explain that. You can test that protocol out and sure enough, I think if you find that that works then it probably was an electrolyte imbalance issue that was causing you to cramp.  That has certainly been the case for me over the years.  The neuromuscular theory of fatigue playing a role in cramping I think has a lot of merit too.  I mean, I’ve not been riding my bike much at all lately and I noticed even in a 35 minute session this morning--I was a bit sloppy in getting the bike set up properly because we’ve got a watt bike at home and my wife uses it and she’s quite a bit shorter than me.  So she’s got her little marker on there and I’ve got my marker on it and I was in a rush this morning because I’ve got to get on a call and this so I like slammed the seat up and didn’t really put it in and it was a bit low. But you know, you kind of get into the session and I’m not getting off to change that, then by the end of the session my hip flexors are starting to get a little bit crampy.  And I’m 100% convinced that’s got nothing to do with electrolytes at that point.  That’s just I’ve been working them at a funny angle which they’re not used to and I’m not very bike fit.  So I think you can fatigue muscles and I think in an Ironman or something both of those things happen at the same time.  You know, you’re going into unknown territory on the run.  You’re running downhill.  You’re smashing your quads that have just done five or six hours on the bike and you’re dehydrated and electrolyte depleted and you’re glycogen depleted and you biked too hard because you didn’t listen to your TriDot coach and you get cramps.  So it’s kind of one of those things where we always say to people you’ve got to look at it holistically...getting your electrolyte balance right will probably help as will pacing properly, training correctly, training specifically in the positions, the shoes, all that.  I’ve heard loads of people getting hamstring nips and cramps running in these, like the VaporFly shoes and things if they haven’t been doing enough training mileage in them because those things are providing so much extra spring.  If you’re going to run in a carbon shoe, you’ve got to train in a carbon shoe.

Elizabeth:  One of the things that has just come to my mind here is, I’ve had athletes ask me before, “I’ve done my sweat test, feel like I’ve got that dialed in. When do I need to redo it?  How often do I need to redo it?”  Is that something that changes over time?  What would your recommendation be for athletes in terms of retesting?

Andy:  I’d say not too often really.  It’s fairly infrequent.  Your sweat sodium concentration tends to be fairly set.  Mine varies as little as 5% day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month and I’ve done a lot of tests.  We’ve seen similar with most athletes that we work with.  There is some evidence that if you become really acclimatized to a hot environment compared to living in the cold then you might see a reduction in your sweat sodium.  But I don’t think it’s as much as some of the science would make out with athletes that are well trained.  I think if you took someone untrained and trained them then it would be good.  So if you did your first sweat test when you were a novice athlete and you’ve progressed through to being an Ironman pro or whatever, it might be advisable to have done a couple of sweat tests on the way to make sure those numbers aren’t moving, but I think they’re fairly stable.  I definitely think it’s worth once in a while redoing your sweat rate measurement because that can change in different conditions and will change as you get fitter. Your sweat rate tends to go up as you get fitter.  The classic one actually for us would be you train in the UK, you race in the UK and then you get the golden ticket to go to Kona or something and you’ve never been before. Then I would advise doing sweat rate testing in a heat chamber or something to really see how your body’s going to react in totally different conditions.  That can be valuable and it might actually be the same with vice versa for you guys.  If you guys are training in Texas the whole time, but something take’s your fancy to go and do the Norseman in Norway and it’s like 0 degrees and freezing cold and everything.  You probably want to try and figure out what your body’s going to do in those conditions. So you might look at it like that. But for the majority of the time get your numbers dialed in and then don’t fiddle with them too much.

Elizabeth:  Well gosh!  This has just been like a super informative conversation.  It’s all been great!  For those hardcore, curious athletes in the audience that just want to know more, they’re saying “This isn’t enough!”  We’ve already talked a little bit about your website.  What resources would you point athletes to if they do want to learn more, a little bit about their sweat rate?

Andy:  I’d say primarily hit the website and go and do the online sweat test because that’s free, it’s quick, it gives you some actionable things to go away and try.  There’s no harm in doing that at all.  If you’ve got really specific questions then you can visit the blog pages on our website; a keyword search for.  We’ve got blogs on pretty much every topic you can imagine with hydration now. Occasionally people catch us out and ask us something we’ve never thought of before, but it’s becoming less frequent over the years.  The other one would be you can book a free call with one of the team here.  So we’ve got a team...myself and a bunch of other sport scientists here...you can book a free 20 minute call and we’d love to talk to you.  So bring your questions along.  And it always helps if you’ve kind of done the online sweat test first and had a bit to play around with different strategies because then we can just sit in 20 minutes and try to unpick whatever issues you’ve got and we’d love to do that.

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.

Andrew:  A lot of science talk today so we are going to cool down with a little lighthearted fun.  I call this Andy’s Favorite Things.  Elizabeth and I will shout out ten or so questions to Andy to find out what in the multisport universe are his favorite things.  So Andy, it’s no secret that your favorite electrolyte products come from Precision Hydration, so we’ll glance over that one here today, but are you willing and ready to quickly bear your soul on some other endurance sport categories?

Andy:  Definitely.

Andrew:  Great!  Here we go. Andy, what is your favorite medal in your race medal collection?

Andy:  Oh, that is probably the little wooden bowl that I got in Maui for the Xterra.

Elizabeth:  Alright.  What is your favorite race destination?

Andy:  I absolutely loved doing the race that I did last February, Catalina Island, just off LA.  Actually a swim, run.  It blew me away.  It was an amazing place!

Elizabeth:  That Otillo race?

Andy:  Yep that was cool.

Elizabeth:  Nice!

Andrew:  What is your go-to race morning breakfast?

Andy:  Porridge, or oatmeal for you guys.

Elizabeth:  How about favorite running shoe?

Andy:  There’s probably a long list with that one.  At the moment I’m running in the Nike Air Pegasus Trail Shoe because I run a lot of trails at home.  So I’m getting on well with that.  Two pairs in rotation at the moment.

Andrew:  Favorite band to include on your workout playlist?

Andy:  The Beastie Boys is on every single one of my workout playlists.

Elizabeth:  Alright.  Favorite leg of the triathlon?

Andy:  Run.

Andrew:  Favorite place to vacation with the family?

Andy: The best vacation that we had in the last few years was in Cape Town, South Africa and we climbed Lion’s Head and Table Mountain and that was awesome.

Elizabeth:  Awesome!  What is your favorite time of day to get your workout in?  Early morning, lunch time, late at night?

Andy:  It only happens if it starts before 7:30 am.

Andrew:  Favorite nutrition to take alongside your Precision Hydration electrolytes?

Andy:  That’s a good one.  I’m actually going to sneak in the fact that it’s been recently prototyped new energy chews and energy gels.  I know this is weary.  We’ve got video on here and the people are listening, but we’ve got some energy chews which are coming soon.

Andrew:  If you want to send some our way we’ll gladly try them out.

Andy:  We’ll do that.  Send us your mailing address.  They’ll be with you in the next few weeks.

Elizabeth:  Then last but not least, what is your favorite professional sports team or an athlete that you root for?

Andy:  So, it would be...I’m not a huge--I used to be a big team sports fan and I used to watch football and things like that.  Since coming over to the US though I’ve become quite good friends with a guy who’s the performance nutritionist at the Green Bay Packers and I went to watch the Packers play at Lambo against the Bears and they won.  It was like the greatest.  It was just unreal.  So the Packers are probably…

Elizabeth:  I’m a Bears fan!

Andy:  Oh no!  I’m sorry about that.  At least we did that at the end of the talk.

Elizabeth:  That’s okay.  Most people say sorry when they hear that I’m a Bears fan anyway, so that’s okay.

Andy:  That was amazing, the Packers.  Then the other one is actually, we’ve worked quite a bit in the last few years with the Oakland Athletics and I’ve been looking to visit them a number of times and I have to say; so Brian one of the guys at the Oakland Athletics who’s an athletic trainer there is also a triathlete and they are--him and his crew so Nick, and Jeff, and the guys that are like the nicest people in pro sport.  So because of that and because of Money Ball because that was a great film, I think…

Andrew:  It was a great film.

Elizabeth:  Yes.

Andy:  I’d say the Oakland A’s and they’re like just the most classic, iconic sports team.

Andrew:  Well that’s it for today folks.  I want to thank Andy Blow from Precision Hydration and pro triathlete Elizabeth James for talking to us about the science about hydration.  Head to Precisionhydration.com for more information and/or to partner with Precision Hydration on your own hydration strategy. You can book a one-on-one call with one of their sweat experts to learn how you need to hydrate or you can use promo code TRIDOT for 15% off your order.

Enjoying the podcast?  Have any triathlon questions or topics you want to hear us talk about? Head to TriDot.com/Podcast and click on “leave us a voicemail” to get your voice asking your question on the show.   We’ll have a new show coming your way soon, until then, Happy Training.

Outro:  Thanks for joining us.  Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew.  For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.  Ready to optimize your training?  Head to TriDot.com and start your free trial today!  TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.