Drinking Problem

I'm off to the Oktoberfest for the sixth(I think) and most likely last time tomorrow. No doubt bits of it will be memorable but there are only six of us going, and just two of us have made every trip, and to be honest I am not looking forward to it as much as previous times.

By coincidence my cycling thoughts are taken up with problems on drinking...

Joe Friel has just posted this blog entry which, as he admits, flies in the face of the advice he and most others have given re how much/often to drink during rides.
http://www2.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2008_09_01_archive.html

In a nutshell he is saying "drink when you are thirsty, enough to stop feeling thirsty".

This makes a degree of sense to me, its the practice I followed until I started to read "expert" advice and I don't recall it causing me any serious issues. I have only really suffered twice on a ride:

• Dragon last year: when I only took water + a bit of food. My one and only "bonk" came on the last Bwlch climb but that was definitely down to running out of energy not liquid (as evidenced by the rapid recovery following me downing a gel).
• Marmotte tryout this year: which was caused by me eating too much too early

I should have drunk more on various sportives and the 12 hour TT but on these felt thirsty and impact on performance was not too catastrophic.

However its worrying that in same week as the above advice another expert says we are not drinking enough!!

http://blog.trainingpeaks.com/2008/09/ask-the-experts-ben-greenfield-on-water-consumption.html

What to believe?

Like most aspects on training its probably a case of different strokes for different folks.

Overall it would be good news if Joe Friel is right, as it makes long, unsupported rides easier.

Since, as mentioned above, my experience "Pre experts" was that I did not need to drink too much I am inclined to go with Joe Friels view. I will adopt that as a default during my long training rides and see how it goes over the winter period.

It helps that one other thing I want to do is to try to do negative splits in training. This should accentuate the impact of not drinking enough. So if I fail do to a workout target, yet don't feel thirsty then I can try to repeat drinking to "little and often" advice and see if that makes a difference. Time will tell.