In Chicago I never thought about water.

The lakefront path had fountains every half mile or so. I ran that path for years and carried nothing. If I got thirsty I ran another quarter mile and there was a fountain. If that one was broken there was another one coming. Water was infrastructure. It was somebody else's problem, and somebody else had already solved it.

Then I moved to Ohio, and the fountains stopped being there.

There are a few. I know where all of them are, which tells you something about how few there are. But "a few" and "every half mile" are different categories of thing, and the difference shows up around mile eight of a long run on a road with no shade and nowhere to stop.

So I started carrying water. Not as a preference. As the only option.

This Turned Out To Be The Right Problem To Have

Here is the part I did not expect: losing the fountains made me better prepared, not worse off.

Grindstone is September 19. It is 32.5 miles with 5,020 feet of climbing, and I will be wearing a pack for all of it. That was always going to be true. What Chicago would have given me is the option to skip the practice. Fountains every half mile means you can train for a year without ever running with weight on your shoulders, then show up on race morning wearing something you have not tested past a shakeout.

Ohio removed that option. Every long run I do now, I do carrying the equipment I will carry on race day. Not because I planned it that way. Because there is nowhere to refill.

I have done two long runs this way so far, one at 15 miles and one at 16, both with a single top-off at a park fountain roughly halfway through. Those two runs taught me more about the vest than the previous two months of wearing it on easy days. You do not learn where a vest chafes at mile two. You learn at mile eleven. You do not learn whether you can pull a flask, drink, and get it back in the pocket without breaking stride until you have tried it forty times with tired arms.

The Math Already Said I Was Short

A couple of weeks ago I ran the actual numbers on fueling, including a sweat test: weigh in, run, weigh out, do the arithmetic. The number came back at roughly 55 ounces an hour on a hot, humid day. What I currently carry is about 34 ounces.

That gap is not a nutrition problem. It is a hardware problem, and it does not get solved by knowing the number more precisely. It gets solved by carrying differently, or by leaning harder on aid stations, or both.

Which is what made me go back and actually think about the carrying part, instead of treating the vest as a settled question.

The constraint is one specific stretch of the race. Aid stations at Grindstone sit anywhere from 4.5 to 9.6 miles apart, and the longest gap, Wolf Ridge to Sand Spring, is also the hardest: 9.6 miles with 2,280 feet of climbing. That is the leg the capacity has to survive. Everything else on the course is easier than that one, and no amount of carrying capacity matters if it does not cover that.

Grindstone is in September. The build goes out weekly until then.

Three Ways To Carry Water, Honestly Assessed

There are basically three options. I have used all of them and I have strong feelings about two.

The handheld. Mine is a HydraPak SkyFlask Speed, 500ml, which is a soft flask with a strap rather than a rigid bottle. I do not love carrying it. Your palm sweats against it for the entire run, the strap stays damp, and you have committed one hand to a job for the next three hours. For an hour it is fine. Past that it becomes the thing you are thinking about instead of the run.

I still use it constantly, for two different jobs.

The first is the runs where a vest is overkill. An hour, maybe a little more, warm enough that I want water but not long enough to need gels or a jacket or anywhere to put them. Strapping on five liters of vest for that is absurd.

The second is as a spare. It packs into the vest, so on the long runs where capacity is the actual constraint it goes in as a third bottle and takes me from about 34 ounces to about 51. Not an elegant answer to the capacity problem, but it is a bottle I already own and it collapses to nothing once it is empty.

So I complain about it and I reach for it constantly. That is because it is the fastest thing to fill at a fountain, the easiest thing to drink from, and it costs almost nothing. If your long runs are under 90 minutes and you just want water on hot days, a handheld is probably the whole answer and you can stop reading.

The belt. I tried one. I do not remember what it was, which is a reasonably complete review. It bounced. Every belt bounces eventually, usually at the point where the bottles are half empty and the water starts sloshing around your waist instead of sitting still. Plenty of people run with belts for decades and swear by them. Mine got enough runs to know it was not going to work, and then it stopped getting runs.

The vest. This is what I use. Hands free, weight spread across your torso instead of hanging off one point, and it carries more than water: gels, phone, a jacket when the forecast is lying. It bounces less than the belt did, which I think comes down to surface area. A belt holds weight at one point and lets it swing. A vest wraps the load against your chest and back and holds it still.

The tradeoff is heat. You are wearing an extra layer over your torso in July in Ohio, and it is exactly as pleasant as that sounds.

What I Actually Run

Salomon ADV Skin 5. It fits close, it does not shift, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth long run I stopped noticing I was wearing it. That is the highest compliment I have for a piece of gear.

The two soft flasks it came with. Five hundred milliliters each, about 34 ounces total, sitting in the front pockets where I can sip from them without taking them out of their pockets. I have not replaced them and I do not have a reason to. They were designed for these pockets, and they collapse as they drain, so the load stops sloshing instead of getting louder.

That is the whole system, and by the numbers it is not enough for the Wolf Ridge leg on a hot day.

What Might Change

Two adjustments on the table, neither of them urgent.

A third bottle is the leading one, and it is the handheld I already own rather than anything I need to buy. That takes the vest to roughly 51 ounces, which is still under what one hot hour asked for in the sweat test, but a lot closer than 34. The cost is more weight and another thing packed against my back in August. The other option is carrying the same 34 ounces and drinking harder at each aid station, which costs nothing and is what plenty of people do anyway.

Probably some of both. That is usually how these things go.

Next

I have a dress rehearsal coming up: loaded vest, everything I plan to have on me September 19. Mostly it is a test of whether the third bottle is worth carrying.

Small tweaks, most likely. Those are the ones that matter at mile 28.