Beyond Recovery Water: Introducing the Sports Drink That Harnesses the Power of Plants

Athletes! They love two things: playing (their specific kind of) ball and shilling product. It is a desire that resides deep in their marrow. Cars, bikes, sneakers, pizza—you name it, an athlete will sell it for you. Most of this is harmless capitalistic gristle: "OK, Michael, now we need you to grip the soda and push it at the camera, real fast like you're punching the camera with the soda. But don't actually hit the lens please, it's very expensive." That sort of thing.

Sometimes, however, shilling goes down an ugly path:

Russell Wilson is not the first athlete to peddle easy solutions to an endemic, complex, and medically murky problem: Tom Brady sponsored an anti-concussion powder, and also Uggs. Colin Kaepernick made some iffy claims about mouthguards on the BS Report.

Wilson's product of choice is particularly dubious, though, or at least particularly bad at hiding its dubiousness. One sideways glance at Recovery Water's website reveals a product that sounds an awful lot like sugar-free Gatorade swaddled in horsecrap pseudoscience nonsense. For instance:

What is "electro-kinetic modification," and how does it deliver "charged nano-structures" into your water? If I'm reading this right, it involves lowering a live rusty power line covered in yogurt into an industrial-size tub of water, then lightly flavoring the water to hide the rust taste, and finally bottling it and selling it at an obscene profit. But who can honestly say? Nutrition and concussion prevention are mysterious forces that lie far beyond the comprehension of normal scientists, let alone regular humans like you and me.

What these products sell, at their core, is control. The human mind and body are frail, and it's impossible to predict what will break them. Proactive solutions like "Stretch before your workout" or "Don't play football because you'll just get hit in the head over and over, extremely hard" are too cumbersome for today's plugged-in, 24/7 lifestyles. You can make a lot of money selling something that offers protection from, say, head injury, even if it does not actually do what it says it will. Most everything claiming to be that kind of silver bullet is built on pseudoscience, and should be regarded with suspicion.

Until now.

I was musing on our hydrangea when the revelation occurred. The hydrangea is a powerful plant, with beautiful, stark baby-blue flowers. Ours was nearly scorched out of existence when a heat wave hit the greater Vancouver, Washington, area last year, and we had to prune it all the way back to its stump. A once mighty monument to plantdom, it stood de-crowned and weak, a knot of stubs and roots lying half-dead on the ground.

If you did this sort of maintenance on a human being, the results would be absolutely horrifying—blood and gore, suffering and certain death, pain the likes of which we could not imagine. But a plant makes an effort to grow, no matter what. In a few months, the hydrangea sprang to life once again. In less than a year, it rebuilt itself into something like its former glory, as seen above. Mortal suffering is unknown to its roots and leaves. If there's something alive—a stem, a seed, a root—it will reach for life. It needs only a sun to reach toward and some small amount of water.

Would that a human being could make those plant properties his own! Eating vegetables is good for you, of course, but your body just breaks them down into component parts, stripping them of life in the darkness of your horrible sweaty body. What you need—what anyone who wishes to excel needs—is a way to make the lively aspects of plants take seed in your body and bequeath their power to you.

Science suggests that I have figured this out. I will give it to you now, for free, because nature and the truth belong to no one.

• A handful of dry beans
• Soil (I suggest Black Gold, an organic potting soil, which will help you keep harmful chemicals out of your body.)
• Fertilizer
• A large glass of water
• A small, grow-grade LED, encased in a pill. (You can find tutorials on DIY websites. Suffice to say, you'll need a pill casing, a light, and a teensy battery)

1. Get injured or concussed. There are a lot of ways to do this. You could drop a weight on your head or break your tibia with two hands and pure force of will, for instance. I decided to skip this step for this demonstration. That's not to say that I wouldn't injure myself for an online sports article, provided it were totally necessary and the money was right. I just did not feel, in this instance, that self-inflicted traumatic brain injury was necessary for me to write this piece as it needed to be written.

2. Mix about a cup of dirt, a teaspoon of fertilizer, and water together in a drinking receptacle, like a cup or a mug or a vase.

3. Take some of the beans and the LED pill and drink them down with the mixture, as you would with pills.

Drink down a few more beans and a glass of the dirt/water/fertilizer mixture every half hour for the next three hours. The beans will need a lot of soil to take root inside your body, which is not traditionally a hotspot for plant growth. (For best results, drink extraordinary quantities of goat's milk several hours before you become injured, as it's a naturally basic liquid that will counteract your stomach's acidity.)

4. Sit back and let the mixture do its work. The beans, taking nutrition from the soil, will sprout in your body and plant themselves into your tissues, growing leaves with the help of the "sunshine" they from the DIY SunPill. When they've rooted, they will fuse with your cells and imbue them with their natural regenerating powers.

Green represents the plants, yellow the transference of plant healing energy throughout your frail, animal body.

Many varieties of seed are adequate for this job, of course—if you're low on money, dandelions will do in a pinch—but beans are natural nitrogen fixers, a plant that restocks the soil in which they're planted and that promotes a healthy growing cycle. This nitrogen, embedded deep in your digestive system, creates an ideal symphony between the healing cycles of the narrow, suffering human body and the never-ending growth and rebirth ambition of the plant.

Beans also have protein, which is good for healing and recovery.

5. If you do this every day, eventually the bean plants will fully fuse with your body and make your healing powerful and never-ending, like a plant-fueled version of the beloved and soulful X-Man mutant Wolverine. If you are a professional athlete, you will have permanently solved your injury problems forever. Riches will follow.

6. Be aware: there needs to be a balance. Too much plant-human symbiosis has been found, in limited trials, to overwhelm the minds of human beings with the ambitions of plants. You may find yourself seeking sunny spots in your yard, carefully setting up a small sprinkler, and then just standing there, taking in the sunlight and the water and feeding yourself like a plant. Eventually, your skin will turn a vibrant green and your feet will take root in the soil.

If not uprooted by a friend or partner, you will swiftly become one with the plants, entering the never-ending cycle of life, dormancy, and rebirth. If a friend or gardener were to cut off an arm, two more would grow in its place. This is something like immortality, but your mind will be forever lost to these cycles, thinking only of air and water and sunlight. It will think not of love, or passion, or sports, or anything that tickled you once. You will be forever, but you will no longer be the person you were, or a person at all. You will only grow, thriving ever skyward, toward the light.

This is the price of leaving behind your frail body. Will you pay it?