Last week I discussed how if you don’t eat and hydrate properly, then do a workout, you probably will get light headed and nauseous.  This week, I am on vacation to our cabin in Canada.  Don’t worry I’m not working, I pre-wrote this post.  

I usually come up here once a year to get away from everything – fish, play cards, no internet, no immediate communication with anybody.  So, if you comment on this post to tell me how inspiring it was, I won’t be able to read it until next week.  But, I will thank you in advance.

So keeping with the theme I started last week, I thought I would give you a real life example I had about almost throwing up during a workout.  I think I’ve shared this story on a previous blog post, but I thought I would discuss it again since this happened while I was in Canada several years ago.

When I go on vacation, most of the time I take the week off from exercising.  It gives my body some time to rest from the normal routine of lifting weights.  The joints can recover, my muscles can recover, and the body can use the break.

This is a good point for any athlete to take home.  You need to take some time to rest in between sports or after a sport.  Let your body rest and recover so it is rejuvenated when you do start revving it up again.

In Canada, we are flown into the deep woods so I can’t go to a gym.  Every so often, I will feel like a slug and decide to get some activity and one afternoon around 3:30pm, I decided that this day was one of those days.  So I got my swimming suit on and went down to the dock.

What I was going to do was swim out into the lake about 75-100 yards, swim back to the dock, and do a bunch of push-ups.  I would repeat this for a certain amount of sets.  I can’t remember how many I thought I was going to do, but that was the gameplan.

Here was my eating pattern prior to this.  I ate dinner the night before probably around 10pm.  Stayed up til the wee hours in the morning playing cards, probably wasn’t drinking that much alcohol since I’m not much of a drinker.  Ate some breakfast around 11am and now here it is 3:30pm and I’m going to do some activity.

Remembering the last article on throwing up while working out, do you think I had eaten enough calories to sustain this workout over a period of time?  Probably not.  Let’s find out.

I swam the first set up and back and felt good.  Got onto the dock and pumped out some push-ups.  I probably went to exhaustion, but I can’t remember.  Breathing a little hard, I dove back into the lake and went out again.  This time it was a little more difficult and took me a little longer.  Went back onto the dock and fired off some more push-ups.

This time I was a bit winded as I struggled back to me feet, made my way to the edge of the dock, and went back into the water.  This turned out to be the last time doing the swim because I kind of pulled myself out of the water and the light headedness was starting to hit me.

I tried to do some push-ups, but the light headedness went to a nauseous feeling and I had to stop and rollover on my back.  I thought I was going to hurl, but instead I laid there for five to ten minutes until the feeling went away.  Once I could get myself to my feet, I went back up to the cabin, made a couple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and upon finishing both sandwiches immediately felt 10 times better.

All it took was very little eating over a long span of hours, 3 laps, and some push-ups to get me to the point I thought I was going to puke.  Probably similar to what our athletes feel like when they get nauseous.

My blood sugar level was low to begin with.  What little I had was spent quickly with the swim and the push-ups.  That is why you need to be properly fueled with food and hydrated appropriately when you workout or are playing sports.  It doesn’t matter how athletic you are, if you don’t have the right amount of fuel in your body, your body won’t let you do your thing.

If you have some similar stories, I would love to hear them.  Share them with us in our comments box below.