Though as a farmer’s daughter Mulan has never had what you might call a sedentary lifestyle, training at Wu Zhong is a world apart from working in her father’s fields.  What makes this worse is that Mulan has never been very good at staying hydrated.  At home she never seemed to sweat as much, even when she’d been working hard, and her mother seemed grateful because the last thing a lady should be is unattractive, even at the most grueling of chores.  

But as Mulan has since found out, it’s because she didn’t drink much water.  And it doesn’t help that usually, she doesn’t even notice until it’s too late.  When she got too dehydrated at home - numb fingertips, pounding head, dry tongue - the solution was easy: to sit quietly in the shade of a tree at the edge of the fields and swig water, slowly, so she wouldn’t get even sicker from gulping it down.  But with Captain Shang’s rigorous regimen there’s no time for that.  She’s had to be a lot more careful about drinking water regularly, and it means she sweats more, but Mulan tries not to think about it because the last thing a shoddy soldier should be worried about is how much he sweats.