Cramps no match for pickle juice antidote
My daughter was visiting and went into my bedroom for something.
“Why is there a jar of dill pickles on your bedside table?”
Leg cramps, I told her.
Everybody knows this by now: when you get leg cramps at night, you drink pickle juice. It only took me 20 years of cycling to find this out.
And it works.
We used to call the cramps charley horses, and I first got them when I was a teenager. Back then, I’d do a bit of calf massage and go back to sleep.
But then came the more serious cycling in hot weather and the dehydration that came with it. No amount of water or Gatorade would stop the dreaded cramping.
The week my friend and I cycled the trail from D.C. to Pittsburgh, the cramps were so bad that I considered bailing and getting a car ride home from Meyersdale. I’m not making this up: As I lay there in bed, I could see the muscle in my thigh twisting. Devoid of pickles, the best I could do was a banana, which has potassium to relax muscles, but I’d eaten the last one that day. And so I stretched and pounded on my thigh until the quads finally settled down.
For those lucky ones who’ve not experienced a charley horse, I’ll describe it for you: eight burly men have grabbed your leg and are twisting it while laughing at you. In medieval times, I think that was called the rack. You will go through all five classical ballet positions to try to find a way to get comfortable, but you will fail. You will take the physical therapist’s advice to point your toes back toward your knee, and you will point your toe back toward your knee, and then up over and around the back of your head and you still will not be able to breathe for the pain.
This brings us to the bar of soap.
“Put it at the foot of your bed under the covers,” my friend said.
Google says there’s no scientific basis to this, but it was worth a try. After a ride, I slept with a bar of Dial. I did not have leg cramps that night. But one must wonder whether it was just not a very leg-crampy night to begin with.
Another friend told me that heat will ease a cramp, and one night early this season I staggered to the bathroom to get my hair dryer. It helped, but not much.
And finally, the pickles.
I’d taken an especially long ride on a very hot morning, and I’d not prepared. Around 11, my right thigh seized up and the twisting rolled down my leg like a flume ride.
“Pickle juice!” I said. To get to it, I would have to stagger out of the bedroom, traverse the living room, and sidestep the dog sleeping in his bed to reach the refrigerator. This was going to hurt.
I opened the jar and took two salty gulps, and then sat at the table to wait. In about a minute the muscles surrendered.
The pickle juice does something to the nerves at the back of the throat, which signal the brain to tell the spinal cord to chill. It’s neurological. You ask me, it’s lifesaving. Thus, the jar on my nightstand.
Pittsburgh has that festival called Picklesburgh. I’ve never been, but if the organizers aren’t marketing the event as a way to prevent cramps, they’re missing out. They could do something like, “Come to the Cramp-Free Zone!”
Seriously, that stuff works.