Training for any long-distance race is very time consuming, and if you want to compete at your best, it will take months of training to build up to getting into the best shape possible. Also in some cases, the race must be signed up for almost a year in advance, and it could even be a goal race years in the making like trying to qualify for Boston and finally getting to run it. Even if it is closer to a last-minute sign up, it is still probably a couple months of anticipation. Then once you sign up, that race lingers over everything, or maybe that is just me. A day does not go by when I am not thinking about my next goal race. So what happens once that race has been run?
Let’s start out with a basic definition. Depression according to google is, “a persistent low mood or loss of interest in activities.” This is the all-encompassing mental health problem that is often referred to now, but there are other more specific types of depression based off of an occurrence in someone’s life. The most common example that I think of when I hear post-depression is post-partum depression. To give another definition from google, post-partum depression is, “depression suffered by a mother following childbirth, typically arising from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.” In a book I am currently reading, Ultra-Something, Brendan Leonard called pregnancy the ultimate endurance activity, so the weird comparison makes some sense…
So when a person has a baby, which, of course, I have not done, their body is heavily taxed. Their resources are no longer solely going to their survival, they are now having to make sacrifices to keep the baby alive inside them, and as we know this is not just a short-term thing it lasts about nine months. As time goes on the baby gets bigger, and it puts more stress on the body, which is now holding more weight in an unbalanced way. Nine nonstop months is an incredibly hard endurance activity. So it makes total sense that once the baby has been delivered that the person’s body is totally out of whack after. Their body has diverted so many resources that their body cannot help itself from being depleted, and this is sometimes what helps lead to post-partum depression.
So now to take the final leap: Post-Marathon Depression. Is training for a marathon the same as carrying a baby? I am going to go out on a limb here and say no, but they do have similarities, so it makes sense that training for and then running a marathon or an ultramarathon can then lead a person to depression. Training starts off slow and easy, but as the weeks progress, the workouts, long runs, and general training runs start to get longer and harder. The energy in the body slowly gets depleted, and if the diet is not altered, it can be easy to get into a caloric deficit and really start to run the body down. Not to mention that many of these runs involve getting up earlier than usual, so sleep may start to decline as well, which will also start to degrade the body.
There are all of these factors adding up to body degradation, but yet we continually ask our bodies for more, and then it all climaxes with a race that lasts 26.2 miles or longer. Something that has been mentally present and nagging in the mind since it was signed up for, which also adds to stress, which is not great for recovery. So after all of the training, we ask our bodies for one final push. We want to use every ounce of energy to run as fast as we can for hours to achieve our goal. This is the ultimate kick to the bucket. It is scientifically proven that after a marathon, we are more likely to get sick, because our immune system is weakened, because just about everything in our body has been weakened. So boom! Total physical exhaustion. Although depression is a mental health disorder, how our physical body feels, our energy levels, and our activity levels all play a key role into our mental health.
Now let’s talk about the mental aspect. As just mentioned, our brains spend a large amount of time thinking about the upcoming race, whether it is positive or negative depends on the person, but it is still hanging there, and the closer the race comes, the more present the thought comes in our mind. On one of my last Strava posts before Berlin, I posted a picture of a spooky Halloween demon decoration, and I said it was a visual of the marathon hanging over my head. I was having a constant mental battle on whether I had trained well enough to achieve my goal. At times I was convinced I was good, and at other times, I was convinced I was going to bonk and do awful, it changed minute by minute, and it was stressful.
So once the race is finished, the mentals are also drained. That leaves the body in a state of deficit in all the important areas. So it makes sense in the days, weeks, or even months following the race that a person might feel depressed. On top of all of that, the routine that had been the norm for weeks is now dead. There are no more long hard workouts and runs, the milage plummets, and everything changes, and it should because the body needs to recover, but as someone who finds extreme comfort in routine, it makes it very hard for me, and there are usually some self-control problems leading to a longer recovery, because I want to run more, although I have been doing good this time! So you might say that it is “just” a race, but it is so much more than that.
There are other compounding factors as well. The race that I felt the most post-race depression after was the Boston Marathon. Boston is revered by many as the pinnacle of marathon racing. People sometimes spend years or even their whole running career chasing a Boston Qualifying time so that they too can make their running pilgrimage and achieve running Nirvana, and as someone who got to run the Boston Marathon as their third marathon, I can say it left me feeling a little aimless. This was like a lifetime achievement, and although it was not even a PR, it was the most incredible running experience of my life, and I would say it still stands as that. After experiencing that, I was left with a feeling of now what? I was only 26, when I ran it, I had so much time left to run, but I just reached what many consider the pinnacle. So once all the adrenaline wore off, a couple of days later, I felt lost. I had never really had that feeling before after running a successful race.
This was also the time, when I came across the idea of the “Post Race Blues” as other articles call it. (I really thought I read one on Outside about Post-Marathon Depression, but everything online says “blues” instead.) I thought it was just something I was going through, which now I realize is never the case, there are so many people in the world, that there are bound to be other people who are going through something similar. I found it very comforting to know that it was not just me.
I even had the problem after Pikes Peak Marathon just half a year later. I finished, and I felt like I had accomplished something, and even though I planned to run JFK, I still felt kind of lost. It was a very weird feeling. I expected the euphoria to last, but it is surprisingly shirt lived, before the weight of all the previous training comes crashing down, especially after really destroying my body going up and down hill, and before I knew it I had the stress of a race again, so it was tough! Then I got hurt and achieved a different kind of running related depression…
It is also important to know that this can occur after a good race or a bad race. It is easy to think that this is only associated with a bad race. All this time and quality training have been dedicated to something, and it does not go the way you wanted it to, it is only natural to feel down after that, like when I ran Chicago and bonked, and I was convinced that I would never run a good marathon, and that I would never qualify for Boston, but of course I eventually got out of that funk and came back better. But post-marathon depression can also happen after a race that went perfectly. As I mentioned, the body could be run down, or you might now feel aimless after achieving a really hard goal. All of these are totally normal and natural feelings. It is important to remember to take care of yourself and your body once you have finished your goal race!
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