Better golf, in Fizzies form

I played football in junior high school and for a little while in high school, in the late 1960s and very early 1970s. We had two-a-day practices each August, before school began. This was in Kansas City, where summertime temperatures occasionally reached a hundred degrees, and the humidity was so high that the air felt like a swimmable liquid, and the droning of cicadas gave the heat an aural dimension.

My school's locker room had a salt-tablet dispenser. We were encouraged to help ourselves before practice but weren't supposed to drink much water, which was said to cause cramps. [#image: /photos/55ad7a51add713143b42a785]|||salttablets.jpg|||

Taped to the wall near the salt dispenser was a large photograph, labeled "Johnny Condition," of someone throwing up into a toilet -- probably a water guzzler. There was a drinking fountain behind home plate on the baseball diamond; we were allowed to visit it once or twice each morning and afternoon, but were encouraged not to swallow. Then, midway through a practice one day in 1970, our coaches gave us each a paper cup containing an orange liquid, which they had produced by stirring powder into a big plastic tub. The powder had been invented by scientists at the University of Florida, and the liquid was called Gatorade. It was the dawning of the Age of Hydration.

Nowadays, of course, there are people who won't attend a thirty-minute office meeting without a big bottle of something to sip on. But overdoing it is undoubtedly healthier than underdoing it. And I've observed, over the course of many summers, that not drinking enough water on a hot day has a major impact, late in a round, on my ability to swing a golf club. Drinking water also gives me something soothingly self-distracting to do while my opponent dithers over a shot in a tense match.

The problem with Gatorade and other sports drinks is that they're loaded with sugars or artificial sweeteners, and if you drink them like water they're also expensive. Recently, I've discovered an excellent workaround: "Active Hydration" tablets made by a company called Nuun. [#image: /photos/55ad7a51add713143b42a793]|||nuuntubes.jpg|||

They contain the good stuff in sports drinks, including electrolytes (whatever those are) and various other things, and they don't contain sugar. They come in plastic tubes, which you can safely keep in your golf bag, and when you drop one of the tablets into your water bottle it fizzes. Do you hear me? It fizzes.

MyUsualGame