After you finish a marathon, you face a difficult decision: Should you have cheesecake before, after or for dinner? Other than that, most marathoners give little thought to what they should do the rest of the day. While understandable, the urge to do as little as possible, or whatever you feel like doing, isn’t your best guide. Instead, you’ll return to full physical and mental strength quickest with a few wise choices after your marathon. Let’s look at what to do immediately after, and then in the ensuing days, so that you recover as quickly as possible.
Immediately After the Marathon
Be excited and enjoy your runner’s high. Congratulate yourself and those around you. Don’t count your blisters. Grab some water. Hug your sweetheart. If your stomach is okay, grab something easy to eat, such as a banana. Wrap yourself in a Mylar blanket or anything else you can find to keep your body temperature from dropping rapidly. (Don’t worry about how silly you look.) As soon as possible, change into dry, warm clothes. Put on fresh socks and a different pair of comfortable shoes with plenty of room to accommodate your swollen feet.
The Rest of the Day After the Marathon
Try to get back to where you’re staying as soon as possible to relax, shower and drink more. If you’re not yet completely sick of sports drink, have some. They are good in many ways. They provide calories in the form of carbohydrates to help to return your blood sugar to normal, they have some vitamins and some even contain a small bit of protein. Light foods, especially vegetables and fruits such as oranges and bananas, that are easy to digest will nourish your body with the necessary calories, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and enzymes you need to completely recover.
If you’re able to walk fairly normally, take a short stroll. This will help your muscles to recover. Doing nothing isn’t ideal. A short walk is almost like a cooldown after a shorter race - it gets the blood flowing a bit to help start the process of tissue repair. After your walk, a light massage would be ideal. Tell the therapist to be gentle - the purpose is just to get your blood flowing, to get the toxins out of and nutrients in your muscles. Then take a warm bath, not too hot.
The best things to eat after the marathon are similar to what you ate before it, meaning an emphasis on easily digested carbohydrates to replenish your muscles’ energy stores. An important fact to keep in mind during this time is what is known as the “recovery window.” After prolonged exercise, enzymes in your muscles are highly receptive to support glycogen production, which was your muscles’ primary fuel during the marathon. The sooner you’re able to take in calories, the more glycogen you will produce, meaning that you’ll be returning your muscles to their normal state that much sooner. During the first hour after you finish - the prime recovery window - your muscles can absorb 50 percent more glycogen than at any other time. Research has shown that, post-exercise, a little protein helps your muscles to absorb that much more glycogen (at a ratio 4:1, that means 4 parts carbohydrates to 1 part protein). During this time, when your stomach is probably still unsettled, an ideal choice would be a smoothie - it’s easily digested, full of carbohydrates and has a little protein.
For your first larger meal, consider carbo(re)loading: whole-grain pasta, basmati rice, whole-grain bagels, oatmeal and other foods that are slow to digest. During the marathon, blood flow was largely shunted away from your stomach to working muscles. So give your digestive system time to return to its normal working condition. It’s usually better to snack a little bit the rest of the day than to sit down to one massive meal.
Once your stomach feels back to normal, make a dash for your favorite dessert. If ever there was a time to indulge your sweet tooth, this is it. (Have we mentioned cheesecake?)
Again, you don’t have to take any of this advice. But be aware that if you follow your natural inclination and just become one with the couch and a bag of chips, you’ll delay your recovery for days. The choices you make soon after the marathon will not just affect your return to running, but also how you’ll feel at home and work in the coming week.
That evening, you might be wound up and unable to sleep much. That’s okay. Reflect on your accomplishment and try not to stress out because you’re sleeping fitfully. Another benefit of having a massage soon after the marathon is that will help relax your nervous system, which has probably been on overdrive since the night before the marathon.
The First Few Days After the Marathon
Listen to your body. You just did an unbelievable run, a great achievement. Recovery is your top priority the first few days after. How you maximize your recovery is individual. Some people recover better by taking a short walk or a 10- to 15-minute jog. I usually jogged the day after, and felt that this very light workout helped me to reduce stiffness and soreness. If you’re an average to good runner, you’ll probably feel better after a short jog. No matter how good you feel, limit yourself to three or four miles. On all your runs in the next few days, keep your heart rate low. A nice, relaxed effort is what you want.
Why do something? As with walking the afternoon after your marathon, light activity will increase your blood circulation, which helps metabolic waste get flushed out and nutrients, delivered by blood, and oxygen to the muscles.
Before whatever light workout you choose to do, don’t stretch. Your soft tissues will be so tight, especially after a hilly marathon; stretching them cold while they’re in this state puts them at risk for slight tears. In fact, all week be very gentle with any stretching you might do. Instead, do very light stretching only after a short workout or warm-up. Focus on your calves and Achilles, quads and hamstrings, and hip flexors and glutes. No more than ten minutes, gently.
Indulge yourself if you have the chance, not just with food. If you’ve run a big-city marathon and aren’t rushing home, do some sightseeing, go on a shopping spree, do something that’s different from the marathon focus you’ve had for the last week. The sightseeing is also good because you get some walking in. In this case, skip your run; the walk will be enough.
This advice assumes that you didn’t hurt yourself during the marathon and can move more or less normally. If you strained a muscle or have bad blisters that don’t allow your normal gait, then don’t run; your altered gait will just set you up for other, compensatory problems.
If you feel joint pain or otherwise think that jogging or walking will hinder, not help your recovery, it’s still best to do something rather than nothing. You need that increased blood flow to hasten muscle recovery. Try some easy crosstraining, such as light spinning on a bike or swimming or water running. It can be hard to distinguish between an acute injury and some general soreness. If you definitely think you have acute pain, don’t wait too long to see a sportsmedicine professional. In most cases, however, your soreness or stiffness will be the result more of simple overloading than true injury.
Returning to Running
I always gave myself time rather than rushing back into training after a marathon. You want to give your body a chance to fully recover. Perhaps even more important, you want to give your mind a break from the focus of training, so that when your body is indeed really ready to train hard again, you’ll have the mental energy you need, too.
Once the acute soreness and stiffness is over, you should still keep your running mileage low. Recovery is still your main priority. This is a good time to mix crosstraining with running, so that you stay active while allowing your energy level to return to normal. On your running days, stick to soft surfaces whenever possible to lessen the pounding on your tired legs. (Of course, this is always good advice, but especially now.) Try to run on your favorite loops so that your runs are as enjoyable as possible. Even if you start feeling great, try to restrain yourself - no long runs, and keep your runs at a low to medium intensity. There will be lots of time for hard training later.
In these first two weeks after the marathon, try to get as much good sleep as possible. You’ll probably be returning to work and your normal life, even though you’ll probably be feeling a little low on energy. If you can get a lot of sleep in during this time, then you’ll handle the return better and won’t delay your recovery.
You’ll also help your recovery during this time by continuing to eat a well-balanced diet, with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and not too many fatty foods. Try not to eat like crazy just because you ran a marathon a week earlier. You’ll have replaced what you burned in the marathon by the third or fourth day after. Healthful food rather than a nightly pig-out platter will leave you feeling better, and you’ll be less likely to put on unwanted weight, now that you’re not nearly as active as you were during marathon training.
As you gradually approach your normal running routine, focus on adding quality before quantity. Try to get a little speed back in your legs. Start with striders after an easy run. They’re short and fun and not too intense, and will help you regain your fast-running form that might have deteriorated a bit during all those months of marathon training. If you feel fine after a few sessions of striders, then add a fartlek workout once a week on one of your favorite loops. Don’t try to quantify your effort - just get used to running faster again. Around this time you could start adding moderate-but-still-not-hard runs of 40 or 45 minutes. Assuming you’re still progressing and you don’t have lingering soreness or low energy, in the fifth week after the marathon you could start to add longer runs and resume track workouts or other workouts where you can compare efforts, such as a tempo run over one of your regular courses.
The Post-Marathon Blues
New mothers know that soon after an event that has preoccupied you for months, it’s easy to succumb to low-grade depression. That’s true even if everything went great with the big event - the baby is healthy, you ran a personal best in the marathon, etc. For such a long time, you were focused on the big day, and how you structured your life was largely determined by preparing for that day. After the day has come and gone, it’s natural to think, “Is that all there is? What now?”
To overcome any post-marathon blues you might have, start by acknowledging your feelings. Sport psychologists say to be aware that they’re normal. Try to plan activities with friends and loved ones. Even if you don’t want to do anything and have to drag yourself to these activities, go. Engaging in these activities will help you to move away, at least temporarily, from your depressed feelings.
If you’re depressed in part because your marathon didn’t go well, try to still follow all the tips above on diet and exercise so that you recover as quickly as possible. Again, acknowledge your feelings. It’s normal to be disappointed when you fall short of an important goal. Acknowledging that disappointment, rather than fighting it, will help you to more easily let go of it. At the same time, try not to let the disappointment overwhelm you. Research shows that a positive attitude toward a tough experience actually speeds your physical recovery. Then regroup and analyze what went wrong in the marathon. If you decide you missed your goal because of simple mistakes, such as going out too fast, or messing up your pre-race nutrition, figure out what changes to make in your training and racing so that the same problem doesn’t pop up in your next marathon.
While you’re reviewing your marathon, be honest about whether your goal was realistic. Was your goal in line with your training? Many marathoners set time goals that are based more on nice, round numbers - “I want to run faster than 8:00 per mile” or “I want to break 3:00” - than an honest assessment of their preparation.
Even if your goal was realistic, were there factors on race day that prevented you from reaching it? Maybe it was too warm or windy, or maybe you had to run by yourself for most of the race. You might still have run a superb marathon but missed your goal time by two minutes because of conditions out on the course. Don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t control.
Once you think you know why you missed your goal, do the same evaluation several days later. By this time, you might not be as emotional about your marathon, and you might have a clearer view of exactly what happened. Maybe by this point you’ll even be able to laugh about the experience if it was something as simple as running the first mile a minute too fast.
If your marathon went well, but now you feel an emptiness, look for a new goal. (For help in choosing good goals, see our article “Make your Wishes come True”.) This doesn’t have to be some monumental new goal. It could be something fun like a track meet. You could also now turn your focus to shorter races, using the endurance you built during marathon training as a springboard to success at 5Ks or 10Ks. I often tried to recover quickly from spring marathons so that I could make use of my hard-earned fitness and endurance during track season. For example, after running the Boston Marathon in April 1992, I recovered quickly, and was able to set a 10,000-meter personal best on the track six weeks later.
One of the best ways to get through this period is to help a friend meet a goal. Become that person’s supporter - maybe run with her, or provide fluids and gels on a long run, or keep him company during a track workout. Helping your friend will help you to get away from your ruminations.
Also during this time, get reinvolved with other areas of your life. You probably sacrificed a lot during your marathon build-up - spending less time with your family, or being more selective about outside activities you take part in. Return to those things that you wanted to do but put aside while you were marathon training. You’ll be glad you did when you once again catch the marathon bug and start serious training.
