Water Intoxication

A woman died while drinking huges amounts of water during a radio station contest. You'd think it would be obvious--even to folks as dense as morning show DJs--that too much of anything is bad for the human body. But there are plenty of dunces who don't think before acting.

I wish someone had told my drill instructors about this twenty years ago, when they forced us to chug two gallons of water in five minutes--immediately before going on a fifteen mile forced march. Desert survival courses tell you that the best way to conserve water is in your body, which is true as far as it goes. Being drill instructors, however--and therefore congenital idiots--they proceeded to make an entirely unjustified leap of inductive logic by assuming that drinking all of your water before you started hiking was a great idea. We could take fewer breaks and win the competition, see...

Queue sixty Marine recruits with too much water in them trying to hike fifteen miles in full gear in less than four hours. You can imagine the results; we didn't even make our deadline. Which, of course, was naturally the fault of we lazy recruits. The drill instructors never do anything wrong, you understand.

Well, they don't hire them for their brains.