syndicate log, issue no. 021: drink until it's clear, cramp anyway

registration for boston 2027 closed at five on friday, so best of luck to everyone currently refreshing their inbox and doing cutoff math. there is a new wrinkle this year: roughly a thousand qualifiers who land on the wrong side of the cutoff get pulled in at random, which means some of you are now in a lottery you did not enter. nothing to do but wait.

so, the numbers you can actually do something about.

the half that moves

we got sweat tested earlier this month. one lab visit, one number, 962mg of sodium per litre, and that number is yours for good. it is the one variable you cannot work out at home with a scale and an hour. what no single test can give you is the other half, how much you are losing on any given day, in any given weather, at any given effort. that half moves constantly, and it is the half running is only now starting to measure.

the people building those instruments tend to have a reason. adria abella villafranca spent years being told to drink water until his urine ran clear. he was a professional tennis player then, playing through arkansas summers, and he did exactly that before every match, and he cramped anyway. drinking to clear is drinking past what you need, and the sodium leaves with it. the fix, when he went looking for it, turned out to be salt rather than volume.

so he built the instrument. hdrop is his company, out of little rock, arkansas, and gen 2 is a 30mm square that sits on your upper arm and reads sweat rate, total loss, sodium, potassium and near-skin temperature while you are moving, live to your phone or your watch. it is $249.99, it runs sixty-odd hours to a charge, and it pushes to garmin, hammerhead, trainingpeaks and, since june, wahoo elemnt. when he started in 2018 he says the few companies attempting this were building disposable patches, and he ruled patches out immediately, so there is nothing to reorder and no subscription. you buy it once.

we have had one on most days since it arrived, which is more than adria recommends. he says once or twice a week is enough to read a trend, and he is right, but sweat rate moves with heat, humidity, effort and how acclimated you are, so one cool morning tells you very little about a hot afternoon. wearing it more often gives you a range instead of a number.

this is a young technology in a category still proving itself, and adria says so more plainly than most people trying to sell you something. hdrop puts its independent validation at roughly 92% for sweat loss and 87% for sodium. the rest of it is on the journal: a tennis player, a senior engineering class, and two paper cups of cafeteria water, one of them salted.

disclosure: hdrop sent us a unit to test and is an affiliate partner. purchases through our links earn syndicate a commission. that never buys coverage.

common interests · deadkit

maybe somebody in your house has an opinion about how many pairs of shoes are by the door. maybe you just want a soar half tight for sixty dollars. deadkit may be for you.

it is one page that pulls together every piece of running gear redditors are selling, more than six hundred listings, filterable by brand, category, shoe size, apparel size, price and where it ships from. you find the thing, it hands you back to the original thread to message the seller, and you can save a search and let it tell you when your size turns up.

what we did not expect was how much of it is indie. scroll it and there is a path projects graves px next to a miler running base half tight next to a literary sport short, which are not brands anybody buys by accident. the resale feed turns out to be a decent read on which small brands people are actually wearing, because you have to buy something before you can get tired of it. there are marathon bibs in there too, which is a different conversation.

deadkit was made by running supply, a site and newsletter locked in on running fashion, marketing, and gear. cole townsend's site is a great resource and we think of it as the focused closet to the one stop run lifestyle shop we are building with you at syndicate.

that's it for this week. if you have a piece of gear you keep going back to, hit reply and tell us what it is. if you have one you are done with, you know where to put it now.

midwest grit meets pacific northwest rain.

come run with us.

graham + mark

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