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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> The article also says there is no downside to your health for drinking more.

You can poison yourself by drinking too much water. Can happen amongst very fit people doing a lot of exercise who think this means they have to down 10 litres of water in half an hour.

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I don't know how anyone can do this without feeling intensely ill. I drank a gallon in about 40 minutes once, and it was readily apparent that nothing about it could be healthy, pleasant, or in almost any way a good idea.

I think they build up to it over time, all trying to out drink each other. I’ve seen mild cases in people in practice - people told to just sip a bit of water but they go ahead and drink multiple gallon jug fulls and then wonder why their legs stop working.

10 litres was an exaggeration of course. I think like 6 or something in a couple of hours is dangerous from the doctors I worked with?

This is from a group of fitness obsessed people doing very arduous exercise.

It's a common problem at large trail races. Enough so that it's one of the two things usually explicitly called out in the race briefings (the other is a reminder to not take ibuprofen).

Why no ibuprofen? I’m not a distance runner so I wouldn’t know.

What’s the problem with ibuprofen?

Ulcers, heart-attacks, kidney damage. But also they mask pain via reducing inflammation and the point of pain is to let you know something is wrong.

Like water it’s fine until you’re swallowing pill after pill.

>Ulcers, heart-attacks, kidney damage

Also, tendon injury/tendonitis seems linked to ibuprofen use. It may delay other kinds of healing (bone fractures, etc)

Not disagreeing with anything here, but are these specific to trail racing?

No, but if it's something that happens commonly in that context it makes sense to call out when in that context.

Hyponatremia is indeed a risk for endurance athletes, and can occur even with drinking less than 10 liters of water. People have somehow got this idea that they need to be constantly drinking water during any exercise, but the reality is there is no health or performance impact to being a little dehydrated for a few hours.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa043901

https://wwnorton.com/books/Good-to-Go/

I just saw a study yesterday that concluded that this was the actual cause of Bruce Lee's death, I don't have the actual study now, but here's the first google link I found:

https://www.abc27.com/news/entertainment/doctors-believe-bru...

Yes. You can. But that is 5x the "eight glasses a day" rec.

I'd also wager the amount of people with health related issues due to too much water consumption is very little compared to too little water consumption.

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