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Old 12-04-2009, 06:10 AM   #7 (permalink)
The_Jazz
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I think that I know EXACTLY how you feel, essendoubleop. I've been depressed after big races, particularly longer ones. I've had it after races I WON for god's sake.

I was very fortunate to have a good trainer (a complete waste of a human being outside the training room, but that's an unrelated matter) in college. She was pretty accomplished at not only healing physical injuries but some of the mental ones as well. After I blew up my ankle at Nationals on year, I spent basically 4 hours a day in the training room for weeks. The first week I was pretty depressed - it seemed like life had shit in my cereal. Towards the end of that week, she stopped by while I was in the ice bath and told me that the next day she was going to put a temporary swimming cast on my ankle and that I was going to do a hard pool workout. When people taper for a race (do big volumes/high stress loads then cut down in the week or so before the race), all sort of hormones and other chemicals are running around with not much to do. Typically, there's a layoff period after the race - there always was for me anyway. She got me basically cross-training in a way that wouldn't injure me any more than I already was (and trust me, my ankle was in BAAAAAD shape) and pulled me out of my depression.

Maybe that's advice you can use, maybe not. It worked for me well enough that ever since I've always made sure that did something after a big race. My lone experience with the marathon was the only exception, and I've never really gone back to running (although I think that there are other reasons for that beyond the above).

Good luck, dude.
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