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the gallon challenge!

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no, not the nasty milk gallon challenge that results in people throwing up and then posting pictures of themselves throwing up all over the internet (i only know this because of the recent google search i did trying to find an image for this blog post).

i'm talking about the water gallon challenge. as you might recall, a few months ago i talked about how bad i am with drinking water. some of you left really helpful suggestions on ways to improve my daily water consumption, and i tried two of them right away: starting the day off with water and nuun.

starting the day off with water went really well, at first. i would keep a filled water bottle right by my bed so it was the first thing i saw in the morning. but then, after a few weeks, i stopped filling it up at night, and convincing myself to make the walk to the kitchen right as i opened my eyes in the morning wasn't happening. i'm sure you can see where this is going; soon, i fell right back in to my old habits of getting my day started and not realizing i hadn't had any water until dinnertime.

pez: okay on their own, not okay in water.
nuun was a different story. i grabbed a little tube of it when i was sports authority one day, and the pink lemonade flavor sounded promising. i dropped a tab in to my water bottle before my workout that day, and was at first happy with the taste. but then, it felt too tart in my mouth and too...nostalgic? i handed the water bottle over to my boyfriend, and together we realized it kind of tasted like watered down pez. not quite what i wanted in a drink. the nuun tabs have gone unused since, but i swear i can still taste it if i use that water bottle.

so i gave up on mission hydration. that is, until i started to really feel the effects of not drinking enough water before my runs. i was getting sluggish a couple miles in and was getting a side cramp after 30 minutes of running. this sort of thing was not going to get me through half marathon training.

amanda at mommygorun had suggested a gallon jug marked off with time increments of when to finish certain amounts of water by, but a gallon sounded really intimidating at the time of my first post, and i know my body doesn't need that much water. but when one of my friends started posting about how she inspired all the ladies in her office to do the gallon challenge, and all the amazing benefits they were getting, i fell in to the "well if they can do it, i can do it!" mindset. i bought a gallon jug saturday night with plans of drinking one gallon of water everyday for the next week.

so far, i'm only on my second day, and the only big difference i'm noticing is that i'm peeing like crazy. however, i do notice i don't have the urge to snack as much, which is saying something, since this is midterms week for me and usually i'm packing in the cookies. what i'm really hoping for, though, is no hydration problems on sunday morning during my 10k! i'll report back with how that goes.

what do you think of the gallon challenge? 

-b

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