Sports
Ralf Rangnick on RB Leipzig’s success and being the godfather of gegenpressing
Source: ESPN
Ralf Rangnick has been called a lot of things during his career in football — Yussuf Poulsen, the RB Leipzig striker, says he’s a “perfectionist,” while his teammate Kevin Kampl says Rangnick is “in love with football.” There were others who poked fun at him back in 1998 when he explained his then new-age tactical system gegenpressing. But when Jurgen Klopp calls Rangnick “one of the best, if not the best German coach,” you listen.
But in 2020, German coaches are the sought-after coaching commodity: take Thomas Tuchel at PSG, Klopp at Liverpool and Julian Nagelsmann at RB Leipzig. All of them were influenced or taught by Rangnick. At the start of this season, seven of the 18 Bundesliga clubs were managed by coaches who had spent time with Rangnick. His influence also spread to key personnel currently in the Premier League, Ligue 1 and Eredivisie.
When Rangnick started out in the 1970s, managers tended to have impressive playing careers and then went right into coaching. It was unfashionable to have a manager who was in the shadows of the German second tier. It was also seen as insulting to champion theories of gegenpressing — a philosophy built on pressing and counter-pressing the opponent, with an emphasis on attacking with positional fluidity — in an age where German football was rigidly 3-5-2, reliant on tried-and-true methods like man-marking that had made Germany a superpower: three World Cups and three runners-up prior to 1990, three Euro titles and two more second-place finishes prior to 1996 spoke to their success. But Rangnick, who had a mediocre, semi-pro playing career, never gave up.
He is living proof of what Italian manager Arrigo Sacchi — one of Rangnick’s heroes, along with Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Ernst Happel — meant when he shot back at a reporter who’d questioned his managerial credentials due to the lack of a polished pro career. “I never realised that in order to become a jockey you have to have been a horse first,” Sacchi said.
As we talk over Zoom, Rangnick chuckles as he rolls Sacchi’s one-liner out.
“The top coaches are not only good leaders of their team but they are also experts in the different areas of the game,” Rangnick tells ESPN. “If you look at the Bundesliga, more than half of the 18 coaches have not had a significant professional career but rather started to develop their methodological skills in youth football.”
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It was transfer deadline day across Europe when we spoke. He was assessing some of the players he helped nurture, like Timo Werner and Naby Keita. He was full of praise for Joshua Kimmich, whom he plucked from VFB Stuttgart’s academy while at RB Leipzig, and Sadio Mane, whom he brought to RB Salzburg. These are just a handful of the players he scouted and signed in his role in charge of Red Bull’s sprawling football empire.
Rangnick was one of the key catalysts behind the ascension of RB Leipzig, who went from foundation to the semifinals of the Champions League in just 11 seasons. They now sit top of the Bundesliga, and travel to Manchester United in the Champions League this week, though Leipzig and these players are just one part of his ever-developing legacy.
There’s an unwavering calmness as he talks through the last year, in which a protracted move to AC Milan never materialised and he left Red Bull after eight years expanding their impressive reach. He then looks to the future and his next move: smiling and methodical, but with this inherent understanding of football and a brain that has a heatmap of disciples stretching out over Europe.
A brief history of Rangnick’s coaching CV starts in 1983 after a short-lived on-field career.
“My coaching career started at the age of 19, senior football then at 25,” Rangnick told ESPN. “In Germany at that time, it was almost impossible to have any role models in the first or second division who inspired me.” He did not like the 3-5-2 system adopted in Germany — the formation which incorporated a “libero,” two man-marking defenders, two defensive midfielders, two wing-backs pounding up and down the flanks and then a No. 10 and a playmaker. He thought it limited, uninteresting.
“I wanted to play in a different way. Around this time, I met Helmut Gross [a hugely influential figure in removing the libero from German football but who worked more as an adviser rather than head coach], who was an early mentor for me and for many other German coaches. He introduced me to the ball-orientated zone-marking technique, which was being implemented at AC Milan. We studied AC Milan hours and nights on end, and it became clear that this was the style of football I wanted to play with my teams.”
This was the genesis of gegenpressing. In 1998, he presented his tactical approach on German TV. Dressed in a black suit and matching shirt, with awkwardly brushed hair and rimless glasses, he explained his new innovative manner of counter-pressing. He was soon coined the “footballing professor,” a term later used as respectful admiration, but originally met with derision and doubt.
“The reaction from the media as well as others in football was extraordinary,” Rangnick said. “The main reason for this was that 30 years before, Franz Beckenbauer set the benchmark for most teams in our country when he created a libero-sweeper position for himself. Franz himself even said in the mid-’90s that you cannot play with a zone-marking back four line because German players will not understand how to play it. I asked myself, why should German players be any less intelligent than those in Belgium, Spain or the Netherlands? For me that was simply not logical.”
The German football system needed to collapse before it could accept change. When the national side crashed out of Euro 2000 in the group stage, it led to a wholesale review of their system.
“Well, it’s very simple,” Rangnick says. “[Gegenpressing is] a very proactive style of football, similar to the way in which Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool have been playing under Klopp,” Rangnick said. “We like to press high, with a very intense counter-pressure. When we have the ball, we do not like any square or back passes.
“The goalkeeper also should not be the one with the most contact on the ball. In almost every league and every country, the goalkeeper is technically the most limited football player on the pitch and therefore we have to make sure that he has the lowest contact with the feet. It is a fast, proactive, attacking, counter-attacking, counter-pressing, exciting and entertaining [style of] football.”
After three years at Hannover (2001-04), where he also got them promoted to the Bundesliga, and then a season at Schalke (2004-05), it was at Hoffenheim where his coaching stock went through the roof as he led them from the third tier to the Bundesliga in 2008.
“What we did in Hoffenheim had a lot of influence on German football,” Rangnick said. “I remember in our first year in the Bundesliga in 2008 we played Borussia Dortmund under Jurgen Klopp, who came from Mainz to Dortmund, and we dominated them 4-1.
“It could easily have been six or seven, because we continuously pressed them for the entire game. The following week Jurgen said that this is exactly the style of football he wants to play with Dortmund in the future. During the next two years he developed his team in such an impressive manner that they managed to win two consecutive championship titles and two cups.”
Following a brief spell at Schalke in 2011, which peaked with them reaching the Champions League semifinal, he became sporting director of Red Bull’s new football arm in 2012. This is arguably his greatest achievement: he challenged the established order in Germany with a new-age structure which built a worldwide network which raised the bar in player identification and recruitment.
Rangnick offered a vision anchored on youth, backed up by analysis and technological advancement with the goal of creating sustainable success on the field while making a profit through selling players at the height of their value and then replacing them with hidden gems thanks to the organisation’s extensive scouting network. Eight years on, and having worn different hats ranging from sporting director to manager (he took charge of RB Leipzig in 2015-16 and then 2018-19), RB Leipzig are now perennial top four contenders in the Bundesliga, RB Salzburg have won the Austrian Bundesliga seven times on the trot and their other teams in the USA (NY Red Bulls) and Red Bull Brazil are all evolving and developing within their system.
Leipzig are a controversial team in German football, with fans of the more traditional club arguing their business model goes against the 50+1 ownership. But they are successful.
“It is quite like in other areas of life, if you are ahead of your time with new developments and pathways, it may provoke certain reactions,” Rangnick said. “Just to put things into perspective, the club was founded in 2009 and won three promotions in five years. Since 2012, it has secured its place in the top-tier Bundesliga and has continuously participated in Champions League, even making a semifinal in 2020. It is something truly rare and extraordinary.”
But equally extraordinary is the Red Bull pipeline of players, as well as the long list of coaches who worked under Rangnick. At Liverpool alone, you have Keita, Mane and Takumi Minamino, while Rangnick signed Roberto Firmino to Hoffenheim and managed Joel Matip at Schalke. Rangnick feels this synergy is because Klopp and he share “similar views on football.” So do a number of coaches throughout Europe.
The School of Rangnick alumni is extensive. Bayern Munich’s head of youth Jochen Sauer was CEO of RB Salzburg from 2012-17. Borussia Monchengladbach’s staff Marco Rose, Alexander Zickler and Rene Maric have all worked or played under Rangnick, so too Adi Hutter at Eintracht Frankfurt and Sebastian Hoeness at Hoffenheim. Then there’s Markus Gisdol at 1.FC Koln, Robert Klauss at 1. FC Nurgenburg, Oliver Glasner at Wolfsburg and a host of others. Over at Monaco their sporting director Paul Mitchell is formerly of RB Leipzig, PSV Eindhoven’s head coach Roger Schmidt was RB Salzburg boss from 2012-14 and Ralph Hasenhuttl was at Leipzig from 2016-18 and has been in charge of Southampton for two years. Then you have Julian Nagelsmann at RB Leipzig and Jesse Marsch at FC Red Bull Salzburg who both learnt from Rangnick.
Nagelsmann, 33, managed Hoffenheim and then replaced Rangnick at Leipzig ahead of the 2019-20 campaign (Rangnick stepped into the manager role for a season to keep the seat warm for Nagelsmann). “Ralf has a special way of looking at football,” Nagelsmann told ESPN. “I used Ralf’s philosophy at Hoffenheim; counter-pressing is a very important topic.”
Over at RB Salzburg is Marsch, who was assistant to Rangnick in the 2018-19 campaign at Leipzig and coached New York Red Bulls from 2015 to 2018. “The beauty of Ralf is that as intense as he is, he also gets really excited about new ideas. As traditional as he is in some ways, he is also very innovative. This is the beauty of Ralf. His contrasting mentalities and his ability to continue to grow and adjust and adapt to the younger generation — he’s got a gift,” Marsch, 46, told ESPN.
Rangnick is 62 years old, but still has the thirst for another big challenge. He came close to joining AC Milan in the summer, but they opted to continue with then-interim coach Stefano Pioli.
“When they contacted me in October they were 13th in the league, just three points from the relegation zone. Then [the] corona[virus] came; after the break and restart they had 12 games and won nine of them with three draws. So it would have neither been wise for myself nor for the officials of AC Milan to change everything after such a successful period of time.”
Rangnick’s vision for AC Milan would have seen him have a powerful voice in both the operational, recruitment side, and then the hands-on role of coaching and picking the team. Almost like a 2020 version of Arsene Wenger’s time at Arsenal. It rocked the boat. Paolo Maldini was critical of Rangnick amid the rumours over his appointment, but Rangnick is resolute in the demands he makes of prospective clubs.
As he assesses his next move, he talks about his three fundamental, non-negotiable pillars of success which he integrated into the Red Bull model.
“For me it has always been very clear, there needs to be someone in the club who is responsible for the club values and guidelines,” Rangnick says. “Someone who is in charge not only for the corporate identity, but also for the corporate behaviour of the entire organization. In this context, I like to speak about three C’s in football: capital or cash, concept and competence.
“It is certainly helpful in football and in business to have some money at your disposal, however, this money will not help you if you do not have the other two C’s in your portfolio. In order to be sustainably successful, you need to have a plan on how to develop the club and the best possible and competent people to implement the concept and plan. Those three C’s were the foundation of our [Red Bull’s] sporting success paving the way for the development of players with quality and increased market value at a factor of 10 or sometimes even higher.”
Player ID is integral. Rangnick educated his scouts to assess players as if through his eyes “It makes little sense to develop a scouting department or engage professionals if you do not listen to them,” he says. “For me it is imperative to proactively plan your transfers and not just rely on agents recommending their players. This enabled us over the years to scout and sign players such as Marcel Sabitzer, Marcel Halstenberg, Lukas Klostermann, Dayot Upamecano, Kimmich, Mane, Keita and Kampl.”
Alongside analytical and tactical evolution, he feels the next step for football is to master the player’s mind.
“Top mentality is the talent of the personality and player strives to get better every single day. In addition to optimal mentality, one of the most important aspects to train in the next few years will be to develop the cognitive abilities for decision-making under pressure when players are in restricted and tight areas of the pitch.”
Rangnick’s next step is unknown. Manchester United have long been linked with him as a potential sporting director, while he has been interviewed for previous vacancies at Everton and the England national team. He’s not yet ready to look back and assess his achievements and role in gegenpressing as we know it, but instead he wants to take all of this experience and knowledge and throw it into another club. There’s an itch there; perhaps the Premier League, or a big Champions League-challenging side. But whoever it is, they will benefit from Rangnick’s ever-evolving view on how German football should be played.
“As we have shown in the last 20 years, we can remain true to the German virtues which can be characterised as follows: disciplined, combative, and an enormous will to win in our playing style while also developing top-class strategic minded coaches who know how to play modern football.”
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Sports
Intelligent Automation and Football: How Lessons from the Pitch can Enhance Automation Initiatives
Neil Murphy, CSO, ABBYY
Football is the most watched sport in the world, with an international passion for the game resulting in some unexpected intersections of culture and commerce. Ted Lasso follows an American football coach’s journey to leading an English Premier League team. Although Ted’s endearing quips and southern drawl might have been mere comedic caricature, the trope of westerners meddling in European football is no longer just fiction.
American actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought English football club Wrexham AFC in November of 2020 for £2m, funding the club’s return to the English Football League for the first time since their relegation over a decade prior. More recently in May of 2023, professional American athletes J.J. and Kealia Watt became minority owners of Burnley Football Club in England.
Now, ABBYY is partnering with Arsenal Women’s Football Club, elevating the trend of western investment from just wealthy individuals to notable technology enterprises.
As enthusiasm for football continues to grow worldwide, these intersections become inevitable, but they’re much more than household celebrity names or mere sponsorship deals. On the surface, using advanced AI within automation solutions might seem like a concept far removed from the sport of football – but this technology has much more in common with what occurs on the pitch than you might think.
Strategy and intent – moving with a purpose
Football is all about control. Without a proper strategy in mind, the ball could easily be taken by a defender, or fall into the hands of the goalkeeper, turning the tide of the game against you in an instant.
Similarly, implementing automation without a clear objective or understanding of your organisation’s current processes will not always yield desirable results. Without proper visibility, you could unintentionally make a bottleneck more visible to the customer, dampening their experience without any gains in efficiency. This isn’t uncommon – 70% of automation attempts fail due to unclear goals.
Understanding your scoring strategy from end to end is crucial to maintain control over your processes, which requires deep familiarity with both your team dynamics and individual traits. Process intelligence, or the practice of driving process improvement through use of advanced data analytics,enables this visibility by combining process mining and task mining into a unified, AI-enhanced platform. While task mining examines individuals’ workflows like clicks and keystrokes, process mining scrutinises the larger holistic process. Much like understanding individual football players’ mechanical skill such as footwork, positioning, and ball control as well as how each player interacts with one another is key to devising an informed strategy, combining insights from task and process mining yields the most contextually accurate model of how a process or workflow can be improved.
Proving it on the pitch
Football fans’ expectations for their respective clubs can reach astronomical heights in the off season, often fueled by the acquisition of up-and-coming talent. While new promises of success can be exciting, not every team will perform as well as we expect them to.
The intelligent automation market experiences a similar trend. The constant upcropping of startup vendors trying to capitalise on the hype train of AI can be overwhelming, with each of them boasting unprecedented potential for efficiency gains without ever having experienced the real pressures of operating a modern enterprise. On the other hand, massive tech-giants will try to leverage their brand recognition and resources to win you over, despite their unfamiliarity and overall detachment from your specific business needs.
It’s unadvisable to jump the gun and sign the rising star that promises to transform your operations without any gametime experience, just as it’s unwise to shell out cash to the household name with an illustrious legacy that’s becoming weak in the knees and slow to keep up. When selecting a provider of intelligent automation solutions, you need to prioritise both innovation and experience, and most importantly, an understanding of and commitment to your organisation’s needs. Haphazardly filling your tech stack with every new tool that promises to yield the best value from AI will create a cacophony of platforms, inhibiting efficiency – take care in selecting your solutions and choose those that have proven their worth in the context of the modern enterprise.
Improving outcomes and predictability through training
There’s no denying that “practice makes perfect.” Dribbling, passing, corner-kicks; even professional players practice the basics every day to stay sharp and dependable on the pitch.
Intelligent document processing (IDP), or the application of AI and machine learningto understand, process, and extract insights from business-critical documents like a human, works similarly. By processing volumes of documents, it hones its accuracy in extracting key information over time. This improves its straight-through processing rate, or the rate at which it can process a document with 100% accuracy without any manual intervention. Leveraging IDP allows professionals to spend less time on repetitive, monotonous manual data entry, empowering them to focus on more fulfilling or customer-facing tasks.
But what if there are more advanced or specific skills you’d like to cultivate within your team, such as bicycle kicks or intricate passing maneuvers? The answer is simple – drill those specific skills, giving your team even more versatility.
With IDP, you can augment your platform with pre-trained document skills that are developed to handle a multitude of specific documents that might be crucial to the full scope of your business. From hyper-specific government forms in Japan that vary per district to US tax forms with seemingly countless variables, IDP can be trained to extract actionable data with staggering accuracy.
Weaving a strong fabric
In sport and business, teamwork is everything. Just as Ted Lasso worked tirelessly to fix Richmond’s tumultuous team culture to bring out the best in his players and weave a strong fabric from their strengths, intelligent automation solutions help drive progress forward at a unified pace.
Adopting a unified suite of automation technology ensures that no facet of your operations will fall behind. It’s impossible to fully benefit from the visibility and insight enabled by process intelligence if you don’t have the technological capability to improve cumbersome document-centric processes. On the other hand, it’s difficult and unadvisable to leverage IDP haphazardly without evaluating where it is most needed.
Bringing the victory home
Intelligent automation and the sport of football couldn’t be any more different on paper, but those with a keen eye for strategy, teamwork, and culture will see the value in applying these to innovation. Implementing intelligent automation doesn’t have to be dauntingly ambiguous – with the right coach at the helm and the right players on the metaphorical pitch, you can assure victory for your organisation.
Lifestyle
Exploring the psychological impacts of a two-month, solo Antarctic expedition
Next month, British explorer Sam Cox will spend two months, completely alone, trekking across one of the Earth’s last true wildernesses – Antarctica.
While travelling 2,000km across snow and ice requires a huge amount of physical endurance, the mental impacts of this journey are perhaps, even more significant.
Alexandra de Carvalho from the Austrian Space Forum will be working closely with Sam pre- and post-expedition, to understand the psychological impacts of the journey.
“The first thing to consider is the sheer isolation of this challenge. Two months with extremely minimal human contact is not something to be underestimated,” she said.
“Our work is mainly concerned with space, and people usually think that space is more distant than Antarctica, but actually it’s not true. It’s much easier sometimes to come back from space, to come back to Earth if there’s an emergency.
“More people have gone into space than trekked to the South Pole.
“To come back to the mainland from Antarctica can be extremely difficult, which exacerbates that feeling of distance. You cannot just be evacuated if you want.”
The only link Sam will have to the outside world is a beacon plotting his incremental location in case of emergency, and very limited communications via satphone.
Alexandra added: “Separated from family and friends, this kind of study will help to really understand more about the psychology of people.
“In fact, this is the main reason we were so keen to work with Sam. He’s in a very special situation, being alone with nobody to share his feelings with, nobody to share his thoughts with.
“It’s rare that scientists can study subjects that are completely isolated for this amount of time, let alone in conditions as extreme as those in Antarctica.
“We really want to get an idea how a person emotionally regulates in this kind of scenario.”
Sam will be taking daily voice recordings of the experiences and emotions he’s feeling during this period of extreme isolation.
Alexandra said: “For this research to be useful, it’s really important that we hear frequent and specific audio diary entries from Sam.
“It’s common for people to look back on an experience like this and say – it was stressful, but it was nice – which is not precise enough for us.
“We’re using audio equipment to make this as accessible for Sam as possible – writing could be a challenge in extremely low temperatures.
“In similar studies, we’ve asked participants to keep written diaries as the fear of being overheard by other participants might stunt their honestly, but that’s not going to be an issue with Sam, since he’ll be completely alone.”
There will be other psychological challenges for Sam, as well as isolation.
Sam said: “An important thing to consider is the 24-hour daylight, and how my body will adapt to that.
“Because I’m travelling during Antarctica’s summer months, the sun will never actually set, meaning my circadian rhythm is likely to get pretty confused.
“A lack of sleep could be detrimental to my physical and mental well-being, so it’s something I’m having to prepare for.”
Alexandra said: “Sensory deprivation could also be a challenge. It’s an interesting environment, but it’s very monotonous, so it depends on the person and how they perceive it.
“For example, Sam might find it interesting to have the colour green. While other people would be fascinated by the sky and the sea, he might be like wow – I really miss the forest and more complex environments.”
Alexandra continued: “This research is not only helping us understand the emotional impact of extreme environments, but it’s helping us understand the type of person that’s suitable for working in these remote places.
“We want to know how people feel in these environments, which emotions are more dominant? How do these people deal with that?
“When people are stationed in distant locations, either from Earth or in polar expeditions, they have to be really trained to deal with their feelings autonomously.
“But we can only do that by understanding when happens within a person and what they’re likely to feel so we can prepare them beforehand. You can prepare, but you cannot run away from your emotions.”
Sam leaves the UK for Antarctica on 24th October, with plans to complete the expedition by mid-January.
He has been supported by Team Forces and Resilient Nutrition to embark on this epic adventure.
For more information, follow Sam on www.frozendagger.co.uk
Lifestyle
Improve your marathon time with proper pre-hydration
Andy Blow, sweat expert and founder of leading sports fuelling and hydration company Precision Fuel and Hydration, discusses how pre hydration can help improve your marathon time.
Dehydration can seriously impact an athlete’s performance, and enjoyment of a marathon.
Yet according to the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 31% of amateur athletes arrive at training sessions or events dehydrated.
For those looking to shave minutes off their race time – simply starting properly hydrated could be the answer.
We caught up with Andy Blow, CEO of Precision Fuel and Hydration, to find out how pre hydration can have such a dramatic effect on your marathon, and how runners can start a race in the best possible condition.
The benefits of pre-hydrating
Optimising your hydration status before a marathon, or ‘preloading’, can increase your blood volume and significantly improve your performance.
According to Sport Nutrition by Jeukendrup and Gleeson, dehydration of just 8% of each individual’s total-body water could half their exercise endurance, based on a 121 minute session.
Research has proven that taking onboard a high concentration of electrolytes, the salts and minerals that help your body function, promotes fluid retention which in turn increases the blood volume in your body.
This increased blood volume supports cardiovascular function helping transport oxygen and fuel to your muscles, and your body’s ability to dissipate heat produced by your working muscles.
This can reduce fatigue and improve endurance performance – helping you run your best marathon possible.
On the other hand, exercising in a dehydrated state can reduce blood volume, limit cardiovascular performance and limit the body’s ability to cool itself through sweat – all limiting the body’s ability to perform.
Pre-hydration is more than drinking water
Hydration is much more than just the amount of water we drink.
Your body is constantly aiming to maintain a balance between water and electrolytes.
It’s therefore important to take on correct levels of both to properly hydrate.
Drinking just water can upset that balance, diluting the body’s concentration of salt. Always wanting to maintain equilibrium, the body’s solution to this is to expel the excess water through urine. It’s basically going make you pee!
Unfortunately, this will also take with it some of the electrolytes in your system, further diluting your blood sodium levels and impacting your performance (and wellbeing in extreme cases).
However, consuming a strong electrolyte solution in the build up to a marathon will boost your salt levels, encouraging your body to retain the water you drink, helping you to start the race fully hydrated.
How to hydrate before a marathon
The timings of a race day, particularly an event as large as the London Marathon, can be vastly different to an athlete’s usual routine.
That’s why planning your hydration strategy is key.
Athletes preparing for a marathon should drink a strong electrolyte drink the night before the race to encourage your body to retain fluid, which will boost blood volume.
Aim for drinks containing >1,000mg of sodium per litre.
The morning of the race, 90 minutes before the start is recommended, athletes should drink another bottle of strong electrolyte drink to top-up blood plasma volume.
It is important to finish this drink 45 minutes before you set off to give the body time to process it.
While this plan will enable the average marathon participant to arrive at the start line hydrated, every person’s sweat concentration and sweat rate will be different, so athletes looking to maximise their potential should know their numbers, do a sweat test and form a more personalised hydration plan.
Dangers of over drinking
As much as beginning a marathon dehydrated can negatively impact your performance, there is also a danger that athletes can drink too much water in anticipation of a race – leading to a new set of problems.
Nervous drinking before a race is common for newcomers to marathon running, and those who haven’t planned their hydration.
Drinking too much water without taking on electrolytes can lead to hyponatremia.
Hyponatremia can be summarised as low blood sodium levels. This can be caused by inadequately replacing the sodium lost when sweating, compounded by drinking plain water or weak sports drinks mixed that further dilute sodium on the body.
Sodium is vital for several bodily functions like blood pressure and working nerves and muscles.
Hyponatremia can cause nausea or vomiting, fatigue, loss of energy, muscle weakness and cramps; all things you want to avoid when running a marathon.
According to National Kidney Foundation, when sodium levels are particularly low, more serious health implications can occur, even resulting in death.
Don’t waste your training
It’s probable that if you’re signed up to a spring marathon, you’ve done months of hard training.
By making sure you start the race properly hydrated, you not only reduce unnecessary discomfort, fatigue and muscle weakness, but will allow your body to realise its full potential come race day.
Training is also an ideal opportunity to test out your hydration strategy. Try running through your pre-race hydration and timings with the confidence that you are in the best possible shape.
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