My experience on the CF is that it is a mis-perception that there is always water 'within a few kilometres', and I addressed that in posts some years ago
here and
here. I first walked in Apr 2010, and was caught badly on the Meseta when many of the fonts listed in
Brierley proved to be dry. Perhaps it was too early for them to have been turned on, the water table was too low, or the pump needed priming. Who knows. But at that time, I learnt not to trust being able to get water between towns, and generally that means carrying enough water for a couple of hours.
Carrying more water than needed can greatly increase your pack weight.
I agree, but
@grayland, I think you have pulled your punches here. How does someone know what water they need to stay well hydrated? Add to this that many people walking the Camino for the first time won't be regular bush walkers/trampers/ramblers/etc and may have no idea about how to tell when they need to drink.
On the first point,
@pjacobi's advice is worth taking:
You need to discover this for yourself while training at home for the Camino.
This is not too difficult to discover. It can be done with any reasonably accurate digital body scales with a measurement interval of 100gm or less. Analogue scales might be used, but the measurements will be more difficult to do.
- First, calculate the volume of your bladder by weighing yourself before and after emptying your bladder from full.
- Second, choose a reasonably tough walk that will be at least two hours long, preferably longer than that. It would also be preferable to do this on a moderately hot day which will start to match the temperatures that you might expect to be walking in on your Camino.
- Take as much water as you would normally carry for the conditions. Measure that if you don't know the volume of the containers you normally use.
- Third, weigh yourself, preferably naked, before you leave home.
- On the walk, empty your bladder only when it is full, and note how many times you do that.
- Fourth, measure how much water you have left at the end of the walk.
- Last, on your return, weigh yourself again, preferably naked.
To calculate your water consumption:
- To the weight difference between start and end, add the weight of urine passed during the walk and the amount of water consumed during your walk. This is your total fluid loss.
- Using the duration of your walk, calculate your fluid loss/hour.
- Compare this to your fluid consumption/hour based on the amount of water that you drank during the walk.
- The difference between total fluid loss/hour and fluid consumption/hour is the rate at which you are accumulating a hydration deficit on the walk.
- You will know how much water / other fluids you might need to carry to stay reasonably well hydrated for any particular leg of the Camino.
So what? My personal observation is that even with good hydration discipline, you will accumulate a water deficit over the course of a walking day, and you will still need to address re-hydration at the end of the day. There are many options for this, but my preference is to make up about 500 ml of hydration solution and consume that first after arriving at an albergue. Others have more interesting approaches, noting that many involve diuretic substances, so may not really address re-establishing your hydration balance for the next day!
The other issue is when to drink. There is a lot of advice available around the internet, but if you start to feel thirsty, you are already becoming de-hydrated, and should drink something then. It is better to drink more regularly, and not let yourself start to feel thirsty. That's hard, and I don't really have a good way of suggesting how that might be done other than some of this comes from experience. So getting some longer walks in during training so that you can practice this is a good idea.
) 1 kilo= 2.2 lbs
