ABSTRACT
Kenya has been increasingly successful in international racing over the last four decades since its emergence in world athletics in the 1960s (Table 5.1). Despite being a comparatively small country comprising just 0.5% of the total population of the world, the majority (51%) of top ten yearly performances from 800 m to marathon in 2004 were from Kenyan athletes. Two recent investigations reported the nutritional and lifestyle practices of elite Kenyan endurance runners preparing for major national competition – the National Championships 2003 and the 2004 Athens Olympic national trials (Onywera et al. 2004; Fudge et al. 2006). The athletes studied were training at a high altitude training camp in Kenya (Global Sports Training Camp, Kaptagat, Eldoret, Kenya) and included world and junior champions. The most striking finding was the remarkably low daily fluid intake of these senior and junior endurance runners, primarily water (1.1 ± 0.3 and 0.9 ± 0.5 L?d-1, respectively)
elite athletes did not consume liquids before or during training, rarely consumed liquids after training, and only consumed modest amounts when they did drink. This finding is remarkable given that such fluid intake is substantially less than the current recommendations of various organizations such as the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) (ACSM 1996a, 1996b), the National Association of Athletic Trainers (NAAT) (Casa et al. 2000; Binkley et al. 2002), and the US Army (Montain et al. 1999). The ACSM suggests 0.4 to 0.6 L of fluid 2 to 3 hours before exercise, 0.6 to 1.2 L?hr-1 while exercising and total replacement of all fluid lost during exercise afterwards (ACSM 1996a, 1996b), a pattern and volume of fluid replacement similar to that of NAAT, and the US Army (Casa et al. 2000; Binkley et al. 2002; and Montain et al. 1999, respectively).
