This is a guest post by Sari Levy. She also writes funny stuff, like The Prairie Dog Blog which points out the oddities of Boulder, CO.

I saw a guy in the lift line the other day that had some sort of fanny pack device strapped around his waist. Two water bottles had been secured to the outside using elastic. He might as well have been decked out in fur-lined booties and J-Lo sunglasses.

“Those better have something other than water in them,” a guy next to me hissed. I focused on being compassionate. (It’s 2012 and I am trying to be the kind of person God doesn’t want to strike with lightning). “He’s probably just from Texas,” I whispered back, meaning that he had possibly missed the latest memo  about  what you are and are not allowed to wear skiing. I am gaffe-prone myself, and therefore study fashion trends so as to minimize the number of people that point and laugh at me.

For example, as it turns out, the cool kids replaced their turtle furs with patterned nylon neckies in 2009 but I’ve only just noticed.

But even I am fashion-savvy enough to know that unless you are hard-core enough to be wearing a backpack with a shovel it in, it is uncool to carry a water bottle. Especially not in your pocket or around your waist for Christ’s sake. There are three reasons for this: 1) falling on a water bottle hurts like hell when it jams into your kidney; 2) peeing in the woods is a good way to lose your friends; and 3) nobody wants to be the guy with the water bottles around his waist or the moron wearing a frozen-solid camelback.

Most experienced skiers (and boarders) plan their liquid intake carefully enough to allow for: 1 coffee-scented-neon yellow pee around lunch, and another (slightly hoppy) leak around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

Problem is, being dehydrated while exercising for five or six hours is a bad idea according to everyone who knows anything about the human body. Because skiers and boarders fluctuate between feeling really hot and really cold, it doesn’t feel the same as being on a bicycle for 5 hours in 90-degree heat (it feels a hell of a lot better, cause you’re skiing, not crushing your testicles on a freakish “saddle” designed by the most sadistic cowboy ever born to woman).

Nevertheless, you are still sweating a lot, and probably losing over a pound of water and 500 mg of sodium every hour. So you need not just water, but sodium and sugar. I’ve never been a proponent of sports drinks, but I’m slowly being converted (by Boulderite Allen Lim) to a product he created for cyclists called Secret Drink Mix. It’s low in sugar, high in electrolytes and made with crushed fruit instead of a bunch of chemicals. It comes in a tiny pouch of powder so I don’t have to pay $8 for a Gatorade.

There are other options too. Though I haven’t tried it, if you want to add protein to the party, there’s apparently evidence that protein increases fluid absorption according to a study in the Spanish Journal of Nuclear Medicine (which you probably saw). Or, as a last resort, you can always take the advice of my persistently stoned high school AP Bio teacher “Smokin” Joe who advised us to save our money and put some salt, sugar and kool-aid into a bottle of water.

To summarize the science, drinking water when you ski is critical because when you start getting dehydrated, your muscles stop working right. The American College of Sports Medicine maintains that “even a small amount of dehydration (1% body weight) can increase cardiovascular strain as indicated by a disproportionate elevation of heart rate during exercise, and limit the ability of the body to transfer heat from contracting muscles to the skin surface...” Additionally, “you may start to feel as if you have to work significantly harder to maintain your performance level.

As dehydration gets progressively more severe, you may start to feel lightheaded, uncoordinated, or have muscle cramps.” I would like to add that while I can (and do) deal with muscle cramps, I cannot deal with the fact that “dehydration slows down the fat-burning process.” Not cool.

The sodium is important because it controls almost every physiological mechanism in the body. When you get low on sodium, you can become hyponatremic. You will feel terrible and slow down; your cognitive abilities will decrease; and you can get sick and experience everything from seizures to pant-crapping.

And as much as I hate to admit it because I try to eat as little sugar as possible, the sugar is actually really important because it helps with transport of water across the small intestine and helps to keep your blood sugar stable during exercise, which does a thousand things, including normalizing brain function (especially important for snowboarders).

So…drink up and (hopefully) hit the slopes.

Quick PDF on Skiing and Hydration