S.W.E.A.T Study – April 15th

Friends,

Today we did a study at Navi Mumbai where one of the runners had kindly consented to use of his flat for purposes of the study. Runners could weigh themselves in privacy and the study went off well. In all 14 runners participated in the study today taking our cumulative number to 28.

Srivatsan summarised the happenings appropriately which I am reproducing here:

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Today morning at 5.30 am, we had a small crowd of runners gathered near Kings Electronics, Nerul as they were determined to find out their Sweat Rate. VenkatP came all the way from Kalina and was accompanied by his wife, Usha, as well. By 6 am, the runners went up to Swami’s residence at Meridien Apartments to fill up the forms and to weigh themselves before start of run. Weather was humid. After filling up the forms and weighing themselves, 14 runners set off for a one hour run.

No runner was to have any water during the duration of the run. Each runner ran at his/her pace for that one hour. At the end of the 1 hour, the runners came back to Swami’s residence and weighed themselves again.

The range was so huge for such a small sample – between 600 ml loss (Usha) to 2.6 litres loss at the other extreme (Sudhir). Some amount of divergence is to be expected considering runners run at different speeds during that 1 hour but the range is yet very large – hence general advice as given in various foreign journals (based on a very small sample) may not be applicable for Indian conditions.

Thanks to Venkatraman for taking the initiative to carry out such a study which we are sure will be very useful to runners across the country once the study results are analysed & appropriate conclusions drawn from it. Usha, Ashwin, Saurabh, Ramani, Sudhir, Ramachandra Rao, Jayant, Praveen, Dnyanesh, Surya, Vedang Murthy, Pramod, Jitu and me took part in the test. My wife, Srividya, assisted VenkatP in his study while Mangesh , Swami’s Man Friday, was there to help us with other logistics.  All runners, including the lone lady runner  Usha, had access to individual rooms for use during the process of weighing.  Thanks to Swami for generously allowing us the use of his premises.

We now look forward to the next Sweat Rate Study whenever it is held again at Navi Mumbai. At the end of the session, Venkatraman patiently answered all the various queries that the runners so eagerly raised.