TOO MUCH WATER IS BAD FOR YOU

And I'm not talking about just when you drown in it. Apparently, a new study is suggesting that runners (or other extreme athletes) can drink too much water and put their health in danger. This sounds totally bizarre to me, but I'll let the article I got it from at NYTimes.com explain it better:

New research on runners in the Boston Marathon, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirms the problem and shows how serious it is.

The research involved 488 runners in the 2002 marathon. The runners gave blood samples before and after the race. While most were fine, 13 percent of them - or 62 - drank so much that they had hyponatremia, or abnormally low blood sodium levels. Three had levels so low that they were in danger of dying.

The runners who developed the problem tended to be slower, taking more than four hours to finish the course. That gave them plenty of time to drink copious amounts of liquid. And drink they did, an average of three liters, or about 13 cups of water or of a sports drink, so much that they actually gained weight during the race.

The risks to athletes from drinking too much liquid have worried doctors and race directors for several years. As more slow runners entered long races, doctors began seeing athletes stumbling into medical tents, nauseated, groggy, barely coherent and with their blood severely diluted. Some died on the spot.

Crazy stuff, huh? So, the next time you do something like a marathon or extreme cardio-type stuff, be careful and pace your water drinking. Granted this only happens to 13 percent of the people who run marathons, but that can still be a good number of people.