Your body needs time to recover, but this doesn’t mean you stop working out
It’s been a week since the Dublin marathon. By now most participants have started to get the feeling back in their bodies as the aches and pains have started to dissipate.
The achievement of a goal is not just about its completion but the journey, the lessons you learn, and the person you become in accomplishing it. The success of attempting to run 26.2 miles should teach you that with discipline, dedication, persistence and hard work you have the traits to achieve success in any field of life you enter.
Break
A study on previous Olympic medalists found that they had one thing in common. They never worked more than 12 weeks in a row without taking a week’s break. So the next few weeks are when you should help the body rest and regenerate.
Your body is tired after its efforts, and the mileage you completed and the length of time you ran for increases the release of a stress hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol is known as the grinch of body-building as it leads to muscle wastage. This leads to a more sinewy and emaciated look on experienced long-distance runners, as the body starts to lose muscle in response to long aerobic efforts.
As muscle burns calories, and a reduction in muscle reduces calories burned, this would help explain the look of some beginner runners competing with excess timber, even after four months of consistent training.
Robert Zapolsky, in his book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers, explains that we are under constant stress. Stress sources include our employment, environment and exercise of any form. When a zebra gets chased by a lion, the stress is temporary and he will either live to tell the tale after the chase or he will be the lion’s dinner.
If the zebra lives, his stress levels will soon return back to normal levels. In training, we produce testosterone for the first approximate 20 minutes and we maintain it for roughly 40 minutes. Testosterone helps us build muscle that burns calories.
After that time we produce more cortisol, which eats muscle and stores fat.
As your marathon training progressed through the months, the weekly mileage increased and the body became more beat up and more nutritionally depleted in vitamins and minerals.
This is why you must give the body time to regenerate and change the type of training you engage in for a few weeks. This could be soccer, tennis, swimming or weight training. Performing the same sports or training repetitively leads to muscle imbalances as the same muscles work all the time and get stronger while other muscles that haven’t worked waste away or get weaker.
In running, the muscles on the front of our thighs get stronger and shorter while our hamstrings on the back of our legs, used in sprinting and decelerating, get weaker and longer. These imbalances can reduce the stability of the knee and lead to repetitive strain injuries. Or, if you were running with excess weight, the hip and knee joints have to absorb more pressure.
Knee injuries are common as the running mileage picks up so your new training regime should focus on strengthening the weak muscles and stretching the over-worked tight muscles.
This may mean performing single-leg exercises to get one leg as strong as another but you should certainly do specific work on the hamstrings.
So in the aftermath of the marathon you should have celebrated your accomplishment. In your training, it is important to engage in a different physical activity to help your body to recover but keep your training habits on the set days you had achieved.
Goals
Swimming is low impact while a regular deep-tissue massage keeps the fluid moving in your muscles and it is an excellent way to keep your muscles limber.
Now that the challenge of the marathon is over, you must set new goals. There is a difference between success and mastery. Success is the achievement of a goal but when your outcome is mastery you are never done.
The skills and discipline you learned in your training for the marathon must be continued. If you are still breathing, there is always work you can do to improve your health.
It is said that hell on earth would be to meet the man or woman you could have been. So savour the success of your marathon and use the lessons you learned from your training and apply them to every aspect of your life.
