The guy in the story basically survived 6 days without water and traveled up to 160 miles during that time.
It's almost unbelievable. I thought that once you loose 4-6 kg of water due to sweat the body does not function any more due to the changed concentration of minerals in the cells.
Tendai "Marathon monks" in mount Hiei finish 1,000-day kaihōgyō with 9-day period without food, water, and sleep but they have to walk only 400m in those last 9-days. Only 46 men have finished.
If I remember correctly the 9-day period was shortened to something like 6 or 7 days, because too many of them died.
Since it seems like a group that already practices and values feats of fasting and endurance it's probably most likely that it commemorates a single particularly notable fast attributed to a specific individual in the community's history. It's possible that that individual didn't actually succeed and it was based on a myth. But I seriously doubt some guy decided one day to try to trick his peers into doing a brutal fast that had never been done.
I used to know a lot of Hispanic immigrants in Chicago. One of them told me his story. It start with his mom sewing two hidden amounts of dollars into the lining of his pants. When the coyotes he'd hired dumped him and 12 others in the desert near the border they were surrounded within minutes by gunmen who put them on their knees. He said a gunman tore straight into his pants and found one of the bundles (but clearly wasn't expecting a second one and didn't find it). He said the gunmen were slashing everyone's water bottles. He begged his captor not to slash his, and him and one other person got lucky. All the bad dudes then left these people to their own fates.
He said he spent three days walking in the desert. They shared the little water they had, but it was gone after a day. Most of the people fell in the desert and didn't get up. At one point a woman with a baby fell and refused to get up. He went back to try and carry her but his two friends dragged him off and told him if he tried to save that woman and her baby that he would die with her. He says a day doesn't go by when he doesn't think about this woman.
On the third night Border Patrol found the three of them, and they all ran, getting split up. He said he spent the entire night hiding in some brush.
In the morning he found a backroad and started following it and a pickup pulled up to him with a Mexican family in it. They took him home, fed and watered him and asked him if he had any money. He gave them everything he had left ($180) and they put him back in the truck and drove him to Chicago and dropped him there with nothing and wished him good luck.
I suppose you are welcome to judge people as you please, but essentially everyone who hikes, skis, climbs, kayaks, skates, surfs, runs, or plays any sort of contact sport will disagree with you.
Almost everyone who did sport on the highest level suffered irreversible damage. Of course modest training is very important and healthy in all aspects.
He offers criticism based upon a biological outcome to a spiritual practice, he does not need to understand to declare the outcome stupid. The cultural practices are protected from criticism stuff does not fly- less all insanity of the past comes back crawling from the cracks. Cant criticise witch burnings as they are a "cultural" practice..
Human sacrifice, genital mutilation and various forms of slavery have all been excused as a 'spiritual practice'. "Understanding" will not make me go 'oh, sure...now your destructive practice makes total sense...carry on'. Get over yourself.
It's part of the human condition I'd say. Drinking causes harm in some way, but most people do it. Sticking to a diet can be harmful in some way, but especially people claiming to be pursuing good health go for them. Sports harms your body in that it causes small injuries that the body has to heal.
Without this stupidity as you call it, we'd be nowhere. Yeah it's stupid to try and hunt a wooly mammoth given they're ten times our size but if our ancestors didn't we wouldn't be here.
I don't know why you're being down voted. You're right.
Most social norms are really weird when you think about them.
Shaking hands. Why is it considered a sign of, I don't know respect maybe, to grab someone's hand and shake it? The chances of them carrying a weapon today are pretty slim. But the handshake still exists. Weird.
While I did in the safety and chillness of my own apartment, I did a 10 day "dry" fast last year. As opposed to water fasting, with dry fasting you are not hungry AT ALL, but the thirst is something else. It's not unrelenting though, it can fade into the background if the air is humid enough and you refrain from talking too much, the mouth hydrates by itself.
During dry fasting the body gets H20 from lipolysis (this is called "metabolic" water), sort of like a camel (though camels have obviously a lot of specialization for this).
Anyway, thought it was a propos, so AMA if curious.
It is incredibly dangerous, hypernatremia sadly occurs way too often in elderly patients in care homes where the patients are weak or mentally incapacitated and can't/don't ask for a drink of water and/or are ignored by their carers for long enough.
It does indeed sound incredibly dangerous, it isn't though. Russians (and some other European nations chiefly Germany) are into fasting, though I only know about Russians organizing dry fasting retreats, like Dr. Filinov https://www.wildestvitality.com/portfolio/items/winter-2023-...
I know it's both a cliché and something that westerners often have forgotten how to do, but you can actually listen to your body and know minute by minute if you're in danger or not. For dry fasting, you are told that if you start getting persistent high heart rate you should stop.
Now what you should find intriguing is why would anyone put themselves through this? Well, it has immense and unique health benefits, that's why. It's been studied, although less than water fasting for obvious reasons. Even water fasters think we're crazy, so I understand.
(And regardless - you usually aren't hungry during an extended water fast either - you do get physiological "pings" during your normal meal times. However, I would assume that if you're depriving yourself of water the body naturally overrides everything with signals for thirst)
I have MS, where autoimmune processes deteriorate the conductive coating on the nerves (myelin), and fasting is known for greatly boosting myelin repair. In fact, the most effective currently known remyelination treatment is a fasting mimetic (metformin) alongside an antihistamine (clemastine). It also regenerates the immune system, with obvious benefits for optimal functioning.
I wonder what would happen if we had a huge truck of fish, then loaded thousand of fish to one of those most dry areas in the world – IE without coyotes – layed out evenly. Would these make good good in few years?
Yes it makes good food, but no you don't need to have an extremely dry place to do this. What you want is a cool climate so there are less issues with insects and bacteria. And it only takes around 3 months.
Adjacent to this I highly recommend the nature writing of Craig Childs, which is somewhat akin in style to John McPhee with a dash of the more lyrical side of Edward Abbey: http://www.houseofrain.com/
> The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”
> Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.
> “I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.
> The boy is one of hundreds of children who need to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border, many of them split from mothers and fathers as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The separations have become an embarrassment to the administration as stories of crying children separated from mothers and kept apart for weeks on end dominated the news in recent weeks.
> Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation.
Readit News
I guess like any deer we'd immediately recognise (and love) the taste of rock salt
Regular mineral water will avoid that.
If I remember correctly the 9-day period was shortened to something like 6 or 7 days, because too many of them died.
He said he spent three days walking in the desert. They shared the little water they had, but it was gone after a day. Most of the people fell in the desert and didn't get up. At one point a woman with a baby fell and refused to get up. He went back to try and carry her but his two friends dragged him off and told him if he tried to save that woman and her baby that he would die with her. He says a day doesn't go by when he doesn't think about this woman.
On the third night Border Patrol found the three of them, and they all ran, getting split up. He said he spent the entire night hiding in some brush.
In the morning he found a backroad and started following it and a pickup pulled up to him with a Mexican family in it. They took him home, fed and watered him and asked him if he had any money. He gave them everything he had left ($180) and they put him back in the truck and drove him to Chicago and dropped him there with nothing and wished him good luck.
I wonder if there are any coyotes nicknamed The Virgil though.
I'm not trying to bait political arguments, but how do we fix the problem with the US/Mexico border?
It seems to me that fixing that requires fixing central American countries first? Why do I feel like this is just hopeless?
We only live once, to avoid anything that might damage your body would lead to a very boring life.
Well, I eat a sweet thing about once a month. I guess that's pretty harmful.
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Without this stupidity as you call it, we'd be nowhere. Yeah it's stupid to try and hunt a wooly mammoth given they're ten times our size but if our ancestors didn't we wouldn't be here.
I also think drinking is stupid.
Most social norms are really weird when you think about them.
Shaking hands. Why is it considered a sign of, I don't know respect maybe, to grab someone's hand and shake it? The chances of them carrying a weapon today are pretty slim. But the handshake still exists. Weird.
During dry fasting the body gets H20 from lipolysis (this is called "metabolic" water), sort of like a camel (though camels have obviously a lot of specialization for this).
Anyway, thought it was a propos, so AMA if curious.
I know it's both a cliché and something that westerners often have forgotten how to do, but you can actually listen to your body and know minute by minute if you're in danger or not. For dry fasting, you are told that if you start getting persistent high heart rate you should stop.
Now what you should find intriguing is why would anyone put themselves through this? Well, it has immense and unique health benefits, that's why. It's been studied, although less than water fasting for obvious reasons. Even water fasters think we're crazy, so I understand.
(And regardless - you usually aren't hungry during an extended water fast either - you do get physiological "pings" during your normal meal times. However, I would assume that if you're depriving yourself of water the body naturally overrides everything with signals for thirst)
Deleted Comment
edit: good food
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish
http://www.houseofrain.com/bookdetail.cfm?id=1183863164364 for example, the epigraph of which burned into my memory:
> There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.
> The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”
> Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.
> “I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.
> The boy is one of hundreds of children who need to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border, many of them split from mothers and fathers as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The separations have become an embarrassment to the administration as stories of crying children separated from mothers and kept apart for weeks on end dominated the news in recent weeks.
> Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation.