Then came hyponatremia. The death of twenty-eight-year-old Cynthia Lucero, who collapsed four miles from the finish line of the 2002 Boston Marathon, focused worldwide attention on a problem that had first been identified more than two decades earlier.9 Though Lucero complained of feeling “dehydrated and rubber-legged” before she collapsed, hospital tests revealed the opposite problem: following the prevailing advice to athletes, she had drunk as much as she could stomach during her run, causing the levels of sodium in her blood to become diluted (that’s what “hyponatremia,” sometimes referred
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