It’s important to be mindful of a potential mental dip in the weeks following the marathon whether you ran a personal best or not!
You have spent a lot of time running and following a training plan therefore, it’s natural that it will impact your self confidence when you don’t run everyday post marathon.
Whilst it’s easy to plan your training schedule, it’s also advisable to think about how you will spend your time post marathon.
1. Respect the recovery process, allow your body and mind a break to recover. Roughly, 2 weeks after a marathon is usually advised to rest from running.
4. Catch up with friends, family and activities you feel you might have missed out on. Maybe even book a nice relaxing holiday..
5. Head to parkrun! You can always guarantee big smiles and happy people
6. Have an extra sweet treat or two that you have missed out on during your tough training!
7. Take your rest seriously! Your body will thank you for it in the long run but remember your fitness will come back very quickly if you recover well
8. Whilst training there will be many days you don’t feel like running, so it’s important to spend time reconnecting to why you like running. After the recovery period have a set time, where you don’t run to a plan, and run when you want to. Mix it up with new routes, new people and different sessions!
9. Journal! Reflect on what went well and what you can learn from. Speak to your coach and start reviewing your running goals, then discuss what races to enter based on your mid to long term goals
10. It’s easy to enter another marathon shortly afterward a disappointment but remember, to run a fast marathon, you need to run less marathons per year. So, don’t rush into entering another race until you’ve been able to reflect and gain perspective of how the race went and what you’ve achieved. Running a marathon is no easy task, not matter what the result!
