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Sandy
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« on: November 01, 2003, 09:58:44 AM » |
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You are done! You have crossed the finish line! Don't stop now! No really, don't just stop. Besides providing a brick wall for the person behind you to run into, if you just stop, you've got all that blood pumping around your body that gets to your lower limbs and has no way to get back to your heart. This is called blood pooling and the effects are light-headedness, dizziness and passing out due to lack of oxygenated blood reaching your head. The best thing to do is keep walking, take any water or drinks offered and ingest them. Walk to your family and friends and keep moving until your heart rate has come down. Now it's time to stretch. If you have done a longer race or are particularly sore, take advantage of a race site massage. They usually only last 10-15 minutes, but this helps to move waste through the body and to reduce muscle soreness. You can and should still treat yourself to a massage later in the week.
Ingesting water and about 200-300 calories of carbs within the first 30 minutes post race and then continually for the next 2 hours will help to reduce delayed onset muscle soreness and speed recovery. Be sure to include 100-200 calories worth of protein within that 2-hour window for muscle repair.
If this was your goal race you may feel an emptiness or lack of direction creep in, in the following days and weeks. Although our tendency is to jump right back into training, especially if we didn't meet our set goals, rest should be on your schedule. It can be rest, rest where you sleep in and do nothing more strenuous than clean the garage, to active recovery. Active recovery can be an activity you haven't done in a while or something you use to supplement your running such as swimming, biking or roller blading. Regardless, it should be non-impact. The recovery rule is 1 day for every mile raced, or if you found your race particularly stressful use 1 day for every kilometre. You can start adding in running 2 weeks post race; just make it low intensity and shorter distances. Write in your training log about racing and nutrition strategies, as well as recovery strategies and any soreness or injuries that surfaced. Talk about your race and experience with others, this will help with closure. After your recovery period, plan your next goal race using the information from your training log to make any required changes.
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