by Marnie Caron
How much should I drink before and during the race?
• Your body should already be well hydrated before your event. To suddenly start drinking a lot of water is not a good idea.
• Continually sipping small amounts of water throughout the day and every day is the best plan, so if that’s not your usual habit, it’s okay to start in the week before the race.
• Try to drink 6 to 8 glasses of water a day, and if you are used to carrying a water bottle when you train, then carry one during the event.
• There will be water stations set up along the course, and if you were to stop and take water at each one you would be adequately hydrated throughout the event.
What last-minute checks should I make?
• At the marathon or half-marathon event, when the start gun is moments away, make sure your laces are double-knotted, your number is pinned on com- fortably, and your stopwatch timer is set to zero. Take a little sip of water. Wish yourself and those around you good luck, and keep moving in whatever space you have until you hear the gun and you’re able to make a start.
• If this is your first marathon or half-marathon event, it isn’t important that you start at the front. You might even want to start toward the back of the pack. Regardless of where you are at the start, your time will be properly recorded because your timing chip is activated only when you cross the start line.
How do I relax the night before and at the start line?
• It’s hard to relax when you’re really excited about something, but you can seek comfort in the fact that the night before the event, the work is done, and there’s really nothing more you can do other than put your feet up and do something you enjoy.
• Have your optimal pre-event dinner, organize your gear, and kick back and relax with family and/or friends.
• Watching movies or reading are pleasant distractions, as are any other mellow, easygoing activities.
Can I set time goals for the marathon or half marathon?
• Some of you will already have a specific, realistic goal in mind for your event finish time. Some of you will be less specific, more intrinsic, with a goal focused more on participation and safely and comfortably completing the distance.
• If you want to set a time goal, refer to the Event-Day Pace Chart on page 83 to estimate your finishing time. By timing how long it takes you to run a mile, you can calculate your approximate race-day finish time. Many beginners add 10 or 15 minutes to this time just to be safe. If nothing else, your approximate goal time gives your family and friends an estimation of when they should meet you at the finish line!
11
After the Finish Line
YOU DID IT! THIS IS A TRULY AMAZING ACCOMPLISHMENT. You persevered and achieved a goal most people wouldn’t even dare to dream about. Congratulations—you are now an official member of the marathoners’ club. No doubt you are feeling pretty good.
Whether you’re an elite athlete or a first-time marathoner, the moment your foot touches the finish line the feelings of euphoria are the same. The marathon is a race of champions. It is a race that demands great physical endurance, as well as mental and emotional strength. From the initial feelings of joy and jubilation to stiff muscles and overall fatigue to finding your next fitness goal, this chapter answers most of the commonly asked post-race questions.
Crossing the Finish Line
You will feel tremendous excitement and exhilaration as you run across the finish line. Drink in these feelings, and take the time to enjoy your accomplishment. You earned it. Don’t downplay your achievement; you are amazing. Enjoy the limelight, and have fun sharing your experience with friends, family, and colleagues. For most people, completing a half or full marathon is one of their biggest lifetime feats.
It’s important to know that you’re also going to feel pretty exhausted. You can anticipate a few aches and pains, but most of your physical discomfort will be minimized by your overwhelming mental high. A proper post-event plan like the one below will help to make your initial recovery a little easier:
• Within 45 minutes of finishing, eat or drink a snack of 200 to 500 calories. It’s a good idea to walk for at least 10 minutes while you drink and eat, to cool down. Finish off with some light stretching.
• If it’s been raining or is a cold day, immediately change into warm and dry clothing.
• If it’s been a hot day, consume a fluid-replacement drink that contains sodium.
• Take care of any blisters that developed during your event.
• If you can, immerse your legs in a cold bath as soon as possible following your finish.
• Later in the day, try to go for a short walk, and continue to drink fluids every hour.
• Pay close attention to your hydration in the 24 to 48 hours after your event. If your urine is dark or tea-colored, check with your physician to make sure everything is okay.
• In the day following the race, walk for 30 to 60 minutes at a leisurely pace to help stretch your muscles.
A need for rest
After first-timers complete a half or full marathon, they experience a great deal of personal satisfaction and commonly want to resume training immediately. Although completing this type of distance event is very motivating, it’s important to be extremely cautious in the following days and weeks.
Training for and completing distance races puts major strain on the body and results in small tears in the muscular tissue. This is normal. These small tears require a significant amount of time to heal and regenerate. It would be dangerous and potentially harmful to resume any kind of intense training immediately following your event.
“Runners who complete a half or full marathon need to take a commonsense approach in their return to running,” says Louisiana sport medicine physician Dr. Bryan Barootes. By doing so, they drastically reduce the likelihood of incurring an injury.
After the Marathon
In the hours following the marathon, you will likely have trouble getting up from a chair or walking down stairs, and you will feel a general sense of fatigue and soreness in the hips and joints. “There are numerous variables affecting how people will feel post-marathon, in terms of what they’ve eaten during the marathon and how much they drank,” says Dr. Barootes. “Weather conditions are also an influencing factor. If, for example, temperatures were high and you were on the course for 6 hours, you may have experienced slight heat exhaustion or dehydration that would require extra recovery time.”
How to recover
Dr. Barootes uses a “10 percent rule” to gauge marathon and half-marathon recovery. “Every day following the marathon, runners should feel a 10 percent improvement in how they feel. A week after, your stiffness should be gone, and at the end of the second week most people will feel like they’re back to normal.” This is not an exact science, so setting concrete parameters is not wise. For example, runners who complete a half marathon will not necessarily feel half as tired or be half as sore as full-marathoners. In most cases, half-marathoners will have walked/run at a speed faster than they would maintain over 26.2 miles (42 kilometers). This means they worked at a higher intensity over 13.1 miles (21 kilometers) than full-marathoners did over 26.2, which is why the recovery time for the two events is similar.
The important factor to remember is to be conservative in your recovery and recognize that it depends on the individual. It might, for example, take your friend 7 days to rid himself of muscle stiffness, but it might take you 22 days. What’s key is that you give yourself the right amount of time to fully recover.
Easing back into an exercise program
Once the excitement of completing your event has worn off, you may feel an emotional dip. It’s not uncommon for athletes to experience a small degree of post-event depression after completing a half or full marathon. This can be attributed to achieving a goal that you have spent a great deal of time and energy to accomplish. Your routine of the past 4 to 6 months has been thrown off, and you now feel a
void in your life. When this happens, it’s common to feel a little down. Dr. Barootes says the emotional low may persist until you get back into your running, start a new activity, or set another goal for yourself.
It’s safe to resume some exercise once you start feeling like yourself again. “You’re ready for some moderate exercise once you are no longer experiencing any pain in your everyday activities, like walking up and down stairs,” Dr. Barootes says. He encourages athletes to start with non-strenuous activities such as walking, cycling, or swimming. Moderation is the key—you don’t want to overdo it, for example risking injury with a long bike ride two weeks after completing a marathon.
Setting Your Next Goal
Now that you’ve completed a half or full marathon you will likely think of yourself as a different person. You have taken yourself to a new level of fitness and probably given your self-confidence a boost as well. You know that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve it. If you have trained with others, you will have made new friends outside your traditional circle. But once the race is over, you may find yourself asking, “Now what?”
From a physiological standpoint, your successful completion of the program brings you both good news and bad. The good news is that the cardiovascular (heart and lungs) fitness you have worked so patiently to develop over the past 4 to 6 months is relatively easy to maintain. All you have to do is carry on doing what you have been doing—exercise aerobically three times a week for 30 to 40 minutes. You do not have to perpetually push yourself further. If, however, you want to continue to improve your fitness level, you’re going to have to continue challenging your body. One way to do this is to train to run a marathon or half marathon at a faster pace. This might involve, for example, some speed training or hill work that focuses on making you stronger and faster. There is a lot of information on speed training on-line.
The bad news is that if you’ve thought of the completion of your training program as the end of the road, the fitness you have worked so hard to attain will slowly seep away, like water into sand. After a few months, it will be vastly diminished. You may find it unfair that you worked so hard and yet can’t rest on your laurels for a while, but that’s the way it is. Your body will return to the state it was in before you started the program.
Some people don’t mind. They may have taken on the program simply to see if they could do it, or because a friend challenged them. Sometimes these people drift away from fitness altogether and never come back. It’s a personal choice—though not a very healthy one.
Other people find that when they get to the end of the program and don’t have a schedule to follow, their motivation slips out the door. It’s not so much a choice: they’re out of shape again.
If this happens to you, or if a life event—sickness in the family, say, or a crisis at work—prevents you from maintaining your current level of fitness, you can always start again. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. You already know that in your hand you have both the prescription and the cure. Many people who let their fitness slide after completing a half- or full-marathon program eventually become unhappy about huffing and puffing like an old steam locomotive every time they have to sprint for the bus, and they return to the program a few or even many months later. It is infinitely better to start again than it is to quit for good.
What next?
You may decide that you want to return to running but need time to settle on your next goal. That goal doesn’t have to be marathon focused. You may want to improve your speed and train for a 5- or 10-kilometer (3- or 6-mile) event. You might give some thought to completing a triathlon. Taking a few weeks off after your marathon or half marathon will help you to recover, but once you’re feeling yourself, ease back into your active lifestyle; your fitness level will still be great. Even if you take months to return to running, be gentle with yourself. Remember that once you get into a regular running program, it won’t be long before you begin to feel like the marathon or half-marathon runner that you are.
If you’re not sure what to do next for your running program, and you don’t want to begin training for another half or full marathon, there are a number of approaches to staying in top form. You can simply commit to running three 30- to 40-minute sessions a week, which should be relatively easy because your body is already programmed to run even more than this. You can adjust the time training to suit your schedule. You may find you want to continue with one longer run on the weekend; this might be an ideal opportunity to meet up with your former marathon-training partners. Many runners continue to meet after completing their event because the experience of training for and completing a race is a bonding encounter that cannot be easily replicated.
RUNNER PROFILE
Nancy
Nancy, 48, is a stay-at-home mom with four children between the ages of 10 and 15. Now that the girls are getting a little older, Nancy has more time to explore her own hobbies and passions. At first she considered volunteering for a few hours a week with a women’s shelter, but then a friend suggested she explore her running potential and possibly train for a marathon. Nancy thought her friend was crazy. After all, it would take time to train, which would mean time away from her responsibilities at home. Her husband worked long hours so that she could stay at home, and she truly appreciated the opportunity to be a hands-on mom, but the idea of doing something completely for herself was exciting.
After some encouragement from her marathoning girlfriends, Nancy broached with her family the subject of her training for a marathon. To her surprise, the entire family started to cheer. Her husband, Seth, was especially excited. Everyone seemed to think she needed to get out of the house and explore the world beyond homemaking. She started to research different marathon programs and eventually decided to join a training group at her local community center. She wasn’t sure about the idea of running in a group, but she decided she would benefit from training with others and learning from an experienced run leader.
Nancy was surprised at how nervous she was on the morning of her first group run. Her family surprised her with a new running top for her first marathon-training session. Part of her wanted to drop out of the program and train on her own, but her family would be disappointed, so she forced herself to go to the initial workout. After the first couple of training runs, she became comfortable with the group and enjoyed listening to the chatter around her. Before long she was able to chat with some of the others in the group while running, and over the months of training she was amazed at how much she looked forward to her group runs. She had even started to meet a couple of the other women for runs during the week. She now finds the upcoming marathon exciting, and she doesn’t know how she would have trained over the months had it not been for her run group.
If you find your motivation slipping away, sign up for one of the many running and walking events in your community. There are runners everywhere these days, and most of them love getting together. The events they attend are partly a way to gauge progress and partly a way to socialize. Your local running-shoe store or community center will likely have a schedule of such events. As well, walking clubs abound, and their weekly activities are often listed in local newspapers.
If you complete a half or full marathon and decide that running isn’t for you, don’t despair. Running isn’t for everyone, which is probably a good thing, because if it were, some running paths would get very crowded. Still, not loving to run shouldn’t mean retreating to the sofa and the television remote control. As discussed in chapter 7, there are all kinds of other enjoyable aerobic activities. Cycling, swimming, cross-country skiing, and hiking are excellent alternatives to running, as are inline skating, kayaking, aerobics to music, walking, or even just putting in some time on the stair climber at your local gym.
When approaching any sport, remember the three rules of exercise—moderation, consistency, and rest— and don’t expect to be an expert right away. Each sport requires unique skills, and it will take you a while to acqui
re them. Each time you take up a new activity, you’ll find there are as many comfort-zone barriers to cross as you are willing to take on. As well, you will invariably reach plateaus of competence that only patience and practice will take you beyond. If you’re having trouble progressing, take lessons, or seek assistance from a more experienced participant; every sport has a dedicated core of enthusiasts who are glad to help newcomers.
Take a break from running
• Once you’re recovered from your distance event, resume some light exercise for a few weeks before getting back into a running program. Most people need at least 3 weeks to fully recover from a marathon or half marathon.
• When you are ready to run, start with three easy 30-minute outings.
• Join a running or walking club.
• Sign up for running or walking events. Check your local running-shoe store or community center for details.
• Continue to keep an exercise/activity log to record your workouts.
• Try other activities. Cycling, swimming, and hiking are just a few of the numerous, excellent alternatives to running.
• If you’ve just completed the marathon and are psyched for another, it’s advisable to wait 4 to 6 months. It’s wise to do no more than 2 or 3 marathons per year. Half-marathoners should wait 2 or 3 months before attempting the next one.
RUNNER PROFILE
Sarah and Bill
Sarah had been a regular runner for years, and when she began dating Bill, they started to join each other for the odd run. Bill, a great all-round athlete, was thrilled to have met a woman who shared his passion for fitness. Given his busy teaching schedule and his work to finish his doctoral dissertation, he found it was great to get in a workout and have time with Sarah.
Sarah and Bill continued dating and eventually moved in together. Over the years, Bill often remarked that he felt most connected with her when they shared regular runs. “Sometimes we don’t even speak, we just enjoy exploring the nearby trails. And there’s something romantic about sharing the calmness of the early morning light. We always return from our runs happier, more at peace with the world and with each other. For both of us, running is truly a gift.”