There is relatively little conversation about recovery after marathons and longer events mainly for two reasons:
- This is not a glamorous topic;
- Many people just take an extended time off and that’s pretty much it.
I’m not interested in the latter: I love my training and would do it even if I could not race. Also, I don’t want to lose all the hard-earned aerobic fitness that took years and many hundreds of hours to accumulate. At the same time, marathons and longer distances beat up your body quite significantly (especially if you “race” them), there is no way around it.
Three marathons (1, 2, 3) I ran before taught me that the recovery consists of three pretty distinct components:
- Acute. The first few days your legs are sore, it’s painful to walk downstairs and sit down, but this soreness subsides pretty quickly (typically 3-4 days for me).
- Chronic/cellular. The next stage of recovery takes a few weeks (4-6 weeks for me usually). During these weeks, your runs feel quite a bit off (both subjectively and in terms of concrete metrics such as heart rate), plus you might be dealing with (hopefully) minor niggles/injuries (don’t shy away from cross-training!).
- Mental. This is the most sneaky part, but perhaps the most important one. When you run a long race, in a matter of hours, you get from the shape of your life (if you trained well, of course) to barely being able to walk, and it takes a number of weeks to bounce back. This quick change is quite hard to process mentally and, as a result, it can cause mild depression-like symptoms. There is nothing much you can do about it and what helps is being self-aware and knowing that this slump is perfectly normal and will pass by itself.
On June 11 this year, I ran my first 53-mile (road) ultra-marathon with 5700+ ft of elevation gain. I pushed hard during this race, had trouble with nutrition and hydration but still was able to come within an hour to what I think was my theoretical fitness limit on the day. In this post, I wanted to reflect on the recovery process and progress.
- Acute phase was not that different from the marathon. Legs hurt maybe for one or two more days, but again, the soreness subsided quite quickly.
- Chronic phase definitely was way harder. Only starting the beginning of the last week (three months after the race), things started to truly turn around. Before then, it was a combination of fatigue (the first set of strides I ran, it felt like I lost any aerobic fitness and I was gasping for air for minutes after the fact, never I felt anything close to it…), injuries (Achilles and one of the knees kept flaring up on different occasions) and (multi-week) sickness. Probably not all of it was caused by the ultra (and two prior marathons, which together with Comrades happened within a span of mere six months), but it was akin to being dug in a hole deeper and deeper. But now things are looking up, and I’m very excited about the positive dynamic.
- Mental phase after running an ultra was what I was worried about the most. Haruki Murakami in his book about running wrote: “Still, the most significant fallout from running the ultramarathon wasn’t physical but mental. What I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, I felt covered by a thin film, something I’ve since dubbed runner’s blues. (Though the actual feeling of it was closer to a milky white.) After this ultramarathon I lost enthusiasm I’d always had for the act of running itself. Fatigue was a factor, but that wasn’t the only reason. The desire to run wasn’t as clear as before. I don’t know why, but it was undeniable: something had happened to me. Afterward, the amount of running I did, not to mention the distances I ran, noticeably declined.” When planning to run an ultra, I was really worried about this quote, especially because some friends had similar experiences. But the reality turned out to be somewhat different: I didn’t lose the desire to run, but all the fatigue and injuries made running noticeably less enjoyable. Given that running is a great source of joy in my life, it really affected my well-being (and I didn’t realize it until my wife pointed this out to me very recently). What hepled me during this time:
- Replace some running with cross-training (cycling); in 2020, I got my first “real” road bike and rode it a lot, but a year later, I switched to running and forgot about my beautiful bike modulo some very occasional cross-training. But this time, I felt in love with cycling again (which of course meant buying some expensive and not quite necessary gear, but it’s a story for another day).
- Talking to my coach: Lindsey’s support and encouragement (and simply programming my day to day training so that I can do it without much (over-)thinking) really helped me to navigate these ups and downs;
- Most importantly, accepting the reality and knowing that it’s just temporary and it will pass, even though in the moment it didn’t feel like it;
- Make much of my running and cycling social.
One interesting aftermath of the recovery is that I have absolutely no desire to race at this moment. I cancelled all the race plans I had for the remainder of this season, and I’m waiting to regain the taste for pushing my body close to the limits. The process of running is still fun though, thankfully.