The Immediate Aftermath of an Endurance Event

Whether you’ve had a great time doing an endurance event (me) or you vow to never repeat it (my husband), one thing is for certain: If you’ve completed serious distance, like a half marathon or a triathlon, the aftermath is interesting. There is a range of emotions and there are any number of physical repercussions. Here is what I imagine to be a rather typical aftermath following an endurance event.

Completion

You are finished. You crossed that finish line, and even if you crawled across it, you are done and with that comes a sense of tremendous relief and accomplishment. You might laugh, you might cry, you might throw up, you might do all three, but you will be trying to get your jelly legs to a spot so you can celebrate. Duration: 1 to 3 minutes.

Celebration

You’re out of the way of the other finishers, so you’re on your next mission: Grab fluids and recovery calories so you can celebrate. Bananas never tasted so good; a bag of chips never so divine. If you’re lucky you hit up the keg and get your celebratory beer so it can go straight to your dehydrated head. Even better: Food. All the food. Duration: 1 hour.

Recovery

Maybe you’ve been sitting down. So you stand up and your muscles groan in protest. You have to get to your car, so you muster the strength to put one foot in front of the other and get there. You feel like you might need a cane. You drink more water, lounge on the couch, order takeout. When you get up after a few hours of chilling, your knees creak. Climbing the stairs to go to your bedroom feels surprisingly difficult. Your knees have never felt like this before. It never felt so good to turn on Netflix from the comfort of bed. Duration: 12 hours.

Soreness

You’re likely to experience delayed onset muscle soreness. Muscles you never felt during training runs are tender. But if you’re lucky, the stiffness of your joints has dissipated and nothing hurts. You feel fatigued and all over sore, but it’s a good kind of sore. A sore that said, I did something. I’m a bad-ass. Duration: 1 to 3 days.

Let Down/Planning

Once you’ve slept it off a couple of nights there is the inevitable: What’s next? Then, of course, if you enjoyed the experience, you start looking for another event to do. Your husband may decide he never wants to tough another half, and that’s okay. You’re looking to the spring for your next. Then you find a Turkey Trot you can do that’s a little friendlier distance for the both of you. You sign up immediately. Duration: 1 to 14 days.

Have you been through these stages of completing an event? What stage would you add? —Erin