Sen. Cory Booker says he fasted and curbed water intake ahead of record-breaking speech

(CNN) — He didn’t even stop to use the bathroom.

Beginning Monday night, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker stood and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, according to his office, breaking the record for the longest speech on the Senate floor in modern history. The 55-year-old New Jersey senator surpassed the late Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957.

Booker never yielded the floor for a break because doing so would have allowed the presiding officer to move on with Senate business. His speech included a wide range of issues, including warnings about the harms he said the Trump administration is inflicting on the American public.

To physically prepare for the feat, Booker used “a lot of tactics,” he said, including fasting and curbing water intake in the days before to make sure he could stand for so long and wouldn’t have to take a bathroom break.

“I think that had good and bad benefits. I definitely started cramping up from lack of water,” Booker told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday. “In the end, I was just trying to do something to stop my muscles from cramping.”

Booker began his speech at 7 p.m. ET Monday with a vow to keep his protest going as long as he was “physically able” and with nothing, he told CNN, but a Bible verse in his pocket. The only times he was not speaking were when he briefly paused for the chamber’s prayer at noon Tuesday and when he took questions from Democratic colleagues.

“In some ways, what he did was an endurance race,” said Dr. James Gladstone, system chief of the Division of Sports Medicine and associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Mount Sinai in New York.

“But his preparation was definitely unorthodox,” Gladstone said. “Most athletes, for an endurance running race, would carb-load leading up to it, certainly hours before the race, and will hydrate to the max and hydrate during the course of the event.”

For instance, “tennis players will have a meal – often something like rice and chicken – two hours before they go out there and play,” said Gladstone, who works closely with professional athletes. That type of preparation would ensure that the body has enough energy and water to fuel it for an extreme activity.

If Dr. Saju Mathew were advising Booker on how to prepare for the marathon speech – and if the senator had been able to take bathroom breaks – he would have recommended the opposite of fasting: nourishing and drinking a lot of water before the event to build stamina.

“You need enough nutrition and enough sleep,” said Mathew, a primary care physician and public health specialist at Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta. “And a week before, you need to start replenishing electrolytes, because you’re going to almost be in a comatose state when you deprive your body from fluids and nutrition for that long.”

Without appropriate fuel or hydration, muscle tightness and cramping can happen, Gladstone said, adding that he was “surprised” Booker didn’t start cramping until near the end of his speech. But Gladstone suspects that the senator fasted for days before his marathon speech so he would “lose those intense hunger pains” that he would have otherwise had if he had eaten closer to the event.

The fact that Booker had muscle cramps indicates that he was in an electrolyte deficit from dehydration, said Dr. Mishal Reja, a gastroenterologist and internal medicine physician at Extension Health in New York.

“When you don’t have enough electrolytes to support your muscles and your blood volume, you get symptoms like that, and if it goes on too long – thankfully, he stopped at 25 hours – but really significant dehydration can affect your kidneys. It could affect urinary issues, and it can even cause you to faint,” Reja said.

Although Booker said he deliberately avoided drinking a lot of fluids so he wouldn’t have to urinate, physically resisting any urges to go to the bathroom could also take a toll on the body too, Reja added.

“I don’t think it was exactly clear if he really needed to pee, but if he did and he held it, then that’s something where they call it ‘post-void obstruction,’ where you use all your muscles to hold in that urinary stream,” Reja said.

“If it gets over a certain level, it could be really dangerous, and you can have some severe bladder issues,” he said.

Booker is now recovering from the marathon speech, and Mathew said that even though the senator seems to be in good shape, he hopes Booker is “chilling at home” and getting some IV fluids.

“I hope for his sake that he has taken the next three days off and he is getting enough sleep and then getting his electrolytes back,” Mathew said. “One thing that is recommended after is to replenish your fluids gradually and eat a well-balanced diet. Something that I would recommend would be coconut water or a sports drink with electrolytes.”

Booker’s recovery should include slowly reintroducing calories and nutrients, Reja said.

“An ideal diet would look something like a little bit of bone broth or a little bit of rice or vegetables, something that’s easily digestible, or bananas,” he said. “And then you replete the electrolytes and you replete the calories, because your energy stores and your glycogen stores in your body have essentially been depleted after 25 hours.”

Booker told CNN on Wednesday that he hasn’t slept much since his record speech.

“My spirit is soaring. My body is definitely weary,” he told Raju, explaining that he couldn’t fall asleep when he got home Tuesday evening because he had “a lot going on” in his mind, so he called his mother and other family members.

Asked about speculation that the marathon speech was a preview for a 2028 presidential campaign, Booker, who is up for re-election in 2026, said, “I need to get re-elected. That’s my focus.”

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