There is life after the finish

All those early mornings were for this. Eat a big meal with the people who waited for you. Tell the story more often than anyone wants to hear it. Go to bed early. In the morning, you start to find out what the lake cost.

On Monday you are back at your desk. Your shoulders ache when you reach for a cup. Your legs feel almost fresh. The ache shows you where the lake worked you. It does not show you how deep.

The clearest look inside comes from runners. Researchers took small samples of calf muscle from 40 men who had run a marathon. They took them at different times after the race.

In the first three days, the runners' fibres were swollen and broken down inside. The mitochondria, the tiny power plants in each fibre, were damaged too. Three to four weeks after the race, the fibres were still being repaired. Two to three months after it, new muscle was still forming. Those runners stopped hurting within days, but the mending went on for weeks. Slow, steady training does not get in its way. Fast sessions and long ones do, because they ask the most of muscle that is still being repaired.

Running costs the legs the most. Every stride lands your whole weight on one leg, thousands of times an hour. In the water, your weight is carried for you. So a long swim costs your legs very little. That difference shapes your first week.

Keep every session this week at base. Base is the steady effort you could keep up for hours. You could talk in full sentences at it. Keep each outing short, with nothing fast and nothing long.

Your shoulders did the work, so give them the week. Your legs did not, so use them. Run or ride at base from the first days. Go back to the water once your shoulders stop aching, with a short swim at base. After a marathon, it would be the other way round.

On Wednesday the man at the next desk is coughing. In the two weeks after a long race, colds come more easily. Researchers in South Africa followed 150 runners from an ultramarathon in Cape Town. They matched each one with a person who did not run. They asked both groups about their health the day before the race and two weeks after it.

In those two weeks, 33 percent of the runners had symptoms of a cold. Of the people who did not run, 15 percent did. The fastest runners had the most colds. The slower runners had no more than the people who did not run.

So the harder you raced, the more the day took. By Sunday your shoulders feel ordinary. Then you have to decide whether one week was enough.

It is Sunday evening. Do you start training again tomorrow? For you, the answer is yes. The lake worked your shoulders, and they are back. It spared your legs, because the water carried your weight. So one week at base was enough.

Some days need a second week at base. Those are the days that went far past what your training had prepared your legs for. A marathon run just to finish is one, and so is anything longer on foot. A shorter day done as a step towards a bigger one needs only a few days at base.

So on Monday you start training again. Your shoulders are ready for it. Wanting to is another matter.

One evening in the second week, you catch yourself checking the weather for a swim you no longer need. The wetsuit still hangs on the balcony. For months the lake shaped your mornings, your meals and your weekends. Now that space is empty.

Researchers in Sweden interviewed 16 recreational athletes in the weeks and months after a long race. The races lasted from four hours to more than a day. Every athlete was pleased with the finish. Several felt invincible for a while.

Then the glow faded. All 16 knew what athletes call the post-race blues. For seven it went deeper. They described an emptiness, a void or a mild low mood. One summed it up as "okay, now what?"

For some it lifted within a week or two. For others it lasted four to eight weeks. The flat feeling does not mean something has gone wrong with you. It means the thing that filled your weeks is over. It lifts as something new fills them.

The researchers suggested setting the next goal before the race, not long after it. Your race is already behind you. So set the next one now.

A few days later, when the house is quiet, you open a map. The next one can be in any sport. Your heart and lungs come with you into a new one. Your muscles and tendons still have to be trained for it, and tendons take months. So give a new sport a date far enough off to train for.

Make it a little beyond the lake. A little longer, a little further, or a little wilder. Wilder can mean the open sea instead of a lake. It can mean a road over a mountain pass. It can mean a first triathlon, with the swim already in you. Then build your training again towards it.

On the map is a strait between two islands, twelve kilometres of open sea. You write the date of next summer's crossing on the kitchen calendar. The lake was a step, not an end.