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Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating reading, and crazy to believe that someone who's run 20 miles in blistering heat and humidity, still has 5 miles to go and is begging with water is instead used as a lab rat and loaded up with drugs so that he be studied, but still not actually given the water he needed. And a bit later, repeating that with the addition of brandy but still no water. Honestly, it kind of seems like these "scientists" didn't care if any of their subjects died.

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Prior to like the 70s it was widely believed that drinking water during marathons (and maybe exercise in general?) was bad. Some of the best American marathon runners would do crazy stuff like run in deep summer wearing sweaters and drinking no water to condition their bodies.

Gatorade was invented in 1965, and the cross country shoe in the 70s. Prior to that it was the wild west, no one studied or knew anything about this stuff really prior to that.

The marathon trials for 1968 Olympics at Mexico City were held at high altitude (women were not allowed to race that far for many more years)

They drank cold coca-cola that was defizzed every five miles, which surprisingly has good fuel as sugar with caffeine

https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20827587/history-in-t...

2:30 marathon at 10,000 feet in August heat is pretty damn impressive given the poor shoe quality over 50 years ago.

Coca cola was still a sports thing in the 90s to the point where I remember being told (maybe apocryphal) that one of the reasons Sampras threw up during the coretja match was he was drinking coke instead of Gatorade or water.

Coca Cola is still a thing among amateur endurance athletes (think cycling for days with minimal rest) and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just water, plenty of sugar and some coffeine.

>It's just water, plenty of sugar and some coffeine.

And a ton of phosphoric acid.

Water with lots of sugar is wrong, when your body needs water.

So drinking water and a sip of cola is fine, but drinking cola against thirst has side effects as you need water to process lots of sugar.

Elite distance runners don't really need much water during a typical marathon. The water serves more as a delivery mechanism for the carbohydrates and electrolytes which they actually need to maximize performance.

Consuming plain water during really long endurance events can cause hyponatremia. Not recommended. But for the short 10k and under running events that most of us do, it doesn't really matter much.

Are those the electrolytes that plants crave?

I don't think the strychnine was a scientific experiment? As the article says it was in use as a stimulant (including medicinally) at the time.

Correct. The scientific experiment was the lack of water.

> James Sullivan, the chief organizer of the games, wanted to minimize fluid intake to test the limits and effects of purposeful dehydration, a common area of research at the time.

All that research, and a hundred years later it turns out that you need to be born from a very small gene pool to set long distance running records. Shows that your research is crap (or gets trapped in a local maximum) if you don't step back to get a complete picture.

Even if that were true, I feel like this is off topic. In the article the winner that cheated got a time of a little over 3 hours, a time that has been unlocked these days for almost any elite due to much better scientific understanding of running, nutrition, and hydration level regardless of genetics.

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