Fail: Homemade Hand Water Bottle

As promised in my previous blog post-the explanation of my homemade (actually home-modified) water bottle FAIL. I have a North Face water bottle belt which I normally use for long training runs. I did have to modify it with by cutting it and sewing some elastic band in because it was way too difficult to get the bottle in and out while running as designed/manufactured. It works pretty well, but sometimes is still a pain to use while in motion.

Recently I had been thinking about the hand held type water bottles that people have. They have a strap on them so that you can strap them onto your hand and not really have to grip the bottle. I do not own one of these, but we had another bottle with a strap on it lying around. I think Joe got it as a gift at some point, but we had never used it. It does have a hand strap, but not one that can be tightened. Being the engineering genius that I am ( ::laughs::), I decided to try to simulate a tighter strap by taping around the bottle and strap. This resulted in a quite ridiculous looking water bottle, but it was tight to my hand and seemed like it would be OK. See here (you get a bonus since Butler the Great is in the background):


This was not a good idea. As soon as a mile from my house, my hand was starting to get very tired. At 1.5 miles, I turned back to go switch to my bottle belt. There is no way I could have survived 18 miles holding onto that thing.