98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive

by Cody Lundin

  Water

  Water is a biological necessity down to the cellular level. It is not an optional item. It’s general knowledge that water accounts for nearly two-thirds of the body’s total weight. It seems that the older we get, however, the drier we become. Floating around in the womb, overall body-water content was more than 80 percent. As a baby, the rate dropped to around 73 percent. In young adults, the body contains roughly 65 percent water, 70 percent in the muscles and 50 percent in fat deposits. Between 40 and 60 years old, water content drops to 55 percent for males and 47 percent for females. After 60, the rate drops even further, 50 percent for males and 45 percent for females.

  Water has several amazing properties, including the fact that it’s an excellent solvent. Water dissolves a remarkable number of inorganic molecules. When dissolved, the molecules break apart to form a solution. Living activities on a cellular level take place either dissolved in fats or water. Water has a high heat capacity, meaning it requires a lot of energy to heat it up or cool it down so it can handle a wide variety of outside temperature fluctuations within the cell before problems arise. The water in your blood helps the circulatory system get rid of excess heat or distribute heat to wherever it’s needed during the cold. Digestion and metabolism are water-based processes, and water lubricates the joints and helps eliminate waste products from the body as well. Water is even required for the simple act of breathing, as the lungs need moisture to oxygenate blood and rid the blood of excess carbon dioxide. Nearly 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that water is life itself.

  My beloved desert can be so hot and dry that people don’t seem to perspire. Since they’re “not sweating,” they underestimate how hot the temperature really is and they ignore the urge to drink. The sinister truth is revealed by putting a hand on the skin for a minute or two. Lift the hand and it’s sodden with sweat, proof enough at the body’s desperate attempt to keep the brain and internal organs cool. In extremely hot temperatures, unprotected skin instantly loses moisture.

  A person at rest loses a little more than a quart and a half of water every day. If you screw up and do everything wrong in a desert-survival situation, however, like attempting to free your car from a sand wash at noon, it’s possible to lose a gallon of water an hour in sweat. A gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds, depending on air temperature! Someone should tell Oprah. This heinous fact should make it readily apparent that the “standard survival recommendation” of carrying one gallon of water per person per day is completely bogus. I recommend at least three gallons per person per day, more if the terrain, temperatures, or activities undertaken are extreme. Seeing as how the average lifestyle consumes 116 gallons to 220 gallons of water every day, with some wealthy communities in my arid state using in excess of 400 gallons daily, it isn’t hard to see our gross neglect regarding the importance of conserving the wet stuff. For every quart of sweat you lose, your heart rate raises about eight beats per minute, your cardiovascular system becomes more stressed, and your cooling system declines. In other words, dehydration sucks and greatly impedes your physical and psychological performance.

  Exercising in the heat without fluid intake does not bestow upon you magical desert-adaptation qualities. In fact, progressive dehydration during exercise in hot climates reduces the sensitivity of the sweat rate/core temperature relationship, thus increasing your risk for heat illness and hyperthermia. It also causes you to become tired much more easily. The quicker you poop out, the less training you’re able to accomplish so your quest for physiological adaptation goes down the toilet. In a nutshell, when you’re dehydrated and you exercise at any given intensity, your body temperature rises faster.

  Regardless of physical activity or whether you spend a lot of time outdoors, if you’re alive, you’re losing water. This “insensible perspiration,” necessary for the health and suppleness of our skin, uses about 600 to 900 milliliters of water per day.

  Deadly Dehydration

  Seventy-five percent of humans are chronically dehydrated. Thirty-seven percent mistake the thirst mechanism for hunger pangs. Lack of hydration is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue. The list goes on and on. If you live in an arid region or one with oppressively high humidity, you know how tough it is to remain hydrated. Doing so takes a lot of work! Although at times it’s hard to remember to drink, and then to drink enough, it is critical that you stay maximally hydrated.

  Dehydration is deadly in hot and cold weather. When the blood in your circulatory system loses water, it gets thicker. Thick blood circulates slower and is harder for the heart to pump, and, in regard to temperature regulation, hinders the body’s ability to lose excess heat or circulate needed heat. When the volume of blood and extracellular fluids decreases, water is literally sucked from the cells, causing them to shrink, thereby damaging cell membranes and the proteins inside. Platelets actually stick together in the blood due to a lack of plasma. The result is an increase in the naturally occurring salts in the remaining body fluids. Normal body fluid has a salt concentration of 0.9 percent. In contrast, urine contains 2 percent salt, plus toxic urea, while sea water has a whopping 3.9 percent. Many researchers feel that rising salt concentrations within the body are responsible for the punishing side effects of dehydration.

  Although dehydration triggers the secretion of several water-conserving hormones, one of which reduces the amount of water lost in the urine, exposure to cold weather without protection increases urine production. When surface blood vessels constrict from the cold, reducing the circulatory system and increasing blood pressure, pressure sensors in the body perceive an increase in volume and stimulate urine production. To add insult to injury, when outside temperatures plummet, so does your kidneys’ ability to concentrate urine. The end result is you lose more water.

  Body functions are severely limited if you lose 10 percent of your weight due to dehydration yet physical, mental, and emotional impairments manifest with the slightest loss of water, especially in the heat. Losing just 2 percent of body weight in water compromises your overall judgement by 25 percent. Being outside in temperatures of 100°F (38°C) or more will cause you to lose another 25 percent! To summarize this horrible truth, the average hiker recreating in hot temperatures who is a quart and a half low on water is operating at half the person he or she usually is! In arid regions around the world, this is a very common occurrence. The water in your body affects your circulation, metabolism, good judgment, and overall attitude. Does this stuff sound familiar? If not, flip back a few pages and reread how fear inhibits your circulation, metabolic process, good judgment, and overall attitude. Holy double negative, Batman! Like a spiderweb, the first strand’s connected to the last. Fiddle with one strand and the whole thing moves. Outdoor enthusiasts take heed. It would be hard to find a real-life survival scenario that did not involve the enemies of fear and dehydration.

  How your body loses water

  Exotic Methods

  What about solar stills, honking-huge, liquid-filled cacti, and other “exotic” methods of procuring water? At my school I teach them all. I teach them to drive home the point that if you fail to carry water with you or know with infinite certainty where to find it above ground, you risk death. Putting a bagel in a plastic bag on the dash of your car in the summer is all the proof you’ll need that the physics behind solar stills does in fact work. The danger comes when you foolishly take the high-school lab experiment into the field under stress, fatigue, and dehydration, coupled with uncountable outdoor variables and expect it to work... at all. Unfortunately, countless books on survival shamelessly tout solar stills as the next best thing since sliced bread. Many authors, judging from their plagiarized text from the old Air Force survival manual and bogus illustrations have never even bothered to build a still. Some photographs exhibit stills that are so poorly constructed that it’s obvious they were quickly dug for nothing more than a convenient photo opportunity. Do I sound critical and hars
h? I think not. Harsh to me is you and your family perishing of dehydration and hyperthermia because you trusted some idiot and bought their bullshit. When my students build solar stills, I keep track of the water they consume while doing so. Without exception, regardless of variables in terrain, weather, earth-water content, solar intensity, added plant material, still sizes, sealing, plastic angle, transparency, number of people, ambient air temperature, digging tools, and time, they always lose much more water in the form of sweat than the still provides.

  So, how do you know if you have enough water in your system? Thirst should never be an indicator of when or how much to drink. Being thirsty is a sign that you’re already a quart to a quart and a half low. To make matters worse, somewhere down the line in Dehydrationville, the thirst mechanism stops working altogether.

  There is no adaptation to dehydration. Military personnel have learned the hard way that “being tough” is not an acceptable substitute for water. Even the most seasoned special warfare soldier can and does fall prey to the punishment of dehydration. Through decades of accumulated training knowledge, the military unearthed the rare gem of “voluntary dehydration.” It was repeatedly observed during outdoor training exercises in hot weather that soldiers would not drink enough water to take care of their needs, even when unlimited fluids were readily available! For some reason, they simply had no motivation to drink. This of course led to a downward spiral in efficiency as the soldiers stumbled deeper and deeper into dehydration. In order to avoid this process, soldiers were forced to drink more water than they wanted. It wasn’t until training ceased and they were back in the relative comfort of their barracks chewing on a pizza that they drank the fluid their bodies so desperately craved. The moral of this story should be as clear as your urine: If you fart around outside in hot temperatures, drink more water than your body seems to want, much more water! If you’re with company, watch them like a hawk and make sure they drink adequate fluids. It only takes one person to compromise the whole group.

  As hinted at above, the best way to tell if you’re maximally hydrated is the color of your urine. It should be as clear as a Rocky Mountain stream with no color whatsoever. Certain medications and vitamins color urine. Vitamins, especially B vitamins, color urine to the point where you could rent yourself out to a nightclub as a neon sign. The frequency and volume of urine produced by someone who has been drinking copiously are other hydration indicators although not as reliable as color. Using the three together will provide the most effective guesstimating as to when and how much you should drink. All proteins require water for digestion, so back off on consuming the lobster tails and elk burgers if the wet stuff is scarce.

  Four Factors for Faster Hydration : Hydrating

  quickly for maximal efficiency at work or in the woods

  There are four factors to consider for achieving maximal hydration in the shortest amount of time. While it’s nearly impossible to obtain all four in the field, it’s quite easy in the office. Corporate efficiency consultants take heart!

  Four Factors for

  accelerated maximal

  hydration

  1. Adequate volume.

  2. Temperature.

  3. Minimal salts, carbohydrates, and sugars.

  4. Carbonation.

  Adequate Volume

  Take a swig of water and this sacred substance runs down your esophagus and into your stomach. Water sitting in your stomach doesn’t mean squat as the stomach does nothing to absorb this wonderful fluid into your body. The trick to maximal hydration in the shortest amount of time is to blow water past your stomach and small intestine and into the large intestine where it’s absorbed. Drinking an adequate volume of water (in other words, feeling like a bloated pig) coerces the stomach into shooting it past the opening between your stomach and small intestine, called the pyloric sphincter. Most people are routinely a quart or more low on water. At the start of my field courses, I have students drink at least a quart or two before venturing into the bush. I have them drink to the point of feeling slightly nauseous. Going beyond this is counterproductive, and we have to start all over again. I minimize their psychological discomfort by reminding them that a camel has the ability to chug up to 120 quarts of water in less than 10 minutes. Although they whine and moan at first, after fifteen minutes of hiking they feel like a million bucks.

  Temperature

  Your body is a very temperature-sensitive creature and likes things done its way. Due to this sensitivity, it stands to reason that dropping temperature extremes into its depths will affect your overall performance. To prove the point, look no further than the glaring example of eating copious amounts of snow contributing to hypothermia. Water that is tepid, or near body temperature, to cool is the most rapidly absorbed by your body. However, in cold weather, warming water to as hot as you can drink helps keep your core temperature stable. Conversely, folks in a hot-weather scenario would benefit from drinking very cool water. Quickly drinking large amounts of cold water can give rise to stomach cramping and, in more serious cases of dehydration, cause you to barf up the goods, so use caution.

  If all this sounds like a lot of common sense, you win the new car. Water temperature is a factor in rapid absorption but should not stop you from drinking hot water in hot weather or cold water in cold weather. Rarely will you encounter cool water in the desert or warm water in the high mountains in January. I’m simply presenting your best possible options. You would have to be well prepared to reap all the benefits of quick, maximal water-absorption techniques but, after all, proper preparation is what this book is all about.

  Minimal Salts, Carbohydrates, and Sugars

  Drinking fluids containing minimal salts, carbohydrates, and sugars helps prevent your body from treating your water like food. The stomach and small intestine absorb nutrients from whatever you put in your mouth—that’s their job. As we have already discussed, for the fluid you drink to be absorbed and stave off dehydration, it must reach the large intestine. The more food-stuff water possesses, the longer it hangs out in the stomach and small intestine digesting.

  A barrage of sports drinks exist on the market, many backed by big-money advertising campaigns. All contain a fierce amount of salt, carbohydrates, and sugar. Electrolyte replacement can be an issue in long-term survival but pales in comparison to dying of short-term dehydration. Add human nature to the mix and powdered electrolyte replacements can ruin your day. My hometown fire department stopped using dry electrolyte replacements because of the false belief that more is better. Regardless of the fact that the directions said to use one scoop per gallon, they used 2, 3, or even 4 scoops per gallon. Because they lacked the water in their systems to process the excessive electrolytes being ingested, they overdosed and got sick. Sports medicine colleges around the nation have completed study after study on hydration and most recommended plain old water. One concluded that the most-efficient mix for marathon runners was a gallon of water mixed with two tablespoons of apple juice. Of the many electrolyte-replacement solutions tested, most were successful at increasing hydration simply because they tasted better than straight water, thus the subject tended to drink more, and more often. Whatever works. To add to the confusion, current research says that although stomach emptying is delayed by sugar, the absorption rate in the large intestine is slightly increased by lightly sweetened drinks. For me, sugary liquids in the outdoors on a regular basis aren’t worth the hassle because water bottles become sticky, a drag to clean, and attract every bee and yellow jacket this side of the Continental Divide.

  Regardless, the most important factor is drinking a lot of water, even if it’s laced with trace nutrients. On desert-survival courses, I sometimes add flavoring to the funky water we find, which is usually warm or hot, and can sport anything from cow dung to decomposing animals. Flavoring the strange brew helps me to get it down and keep it down, and allows me to drink massive quantities of otherwise truly nasty water. My favorite flavorings are the cherry and grape Kool-
Aid packets with added sugar. Stay away from all alcoholic products—alcohol increases dehydration by eliminating more fluid from the body through the kidneys than the quantity of liquid you originally consumed. After all, alcohol is a toxin and requires eight ounces of plain water to neutralize one ounce of it. If electrolyte solutions trip your trigger, so be it, but consider diluting the overall concentration with added water.

  Carbonation

  While undoubtedly the toughest to obtain in the field, the pressure built up from drinking carbonated liquid helps shoot it past the stomach’s pyloric sphincter and into the open arms of your water-absorbing large intestine. Packing along some Alka-Seltzer tablets is a quick and dirty way to carbonate water with just a hint of sodium, which is a potential asset in hot weather as long as you have plenty of water. Pack the stuff without added aspirin and look for the generic version to save cash. By the time you blast out your first belch, your pyloric sphincter will have already opened, so congratulations! Remember, these water-absorption tips are in NO WAY meant to stop you from drinking water that doesn’t pass the test. (I’ll be pissed if I hear you died of dehydration next to a full cattle tank because you didn’t have a case of cool, carbonated bottled water with a pinch of apple juice!)