Recovery: Don’t (Quite) Stop Now
Daily Tip #13
Congratulations on your race! You’ve finished the NYC Half-Marathon Presented by NIKE. It’s time to relax and appreciate what you’ve accomplished, and also to take very good care of yourself. There’s some technique involved in the post-race part of the cycle, too.
One of the great things about a half-marathon is that it isn’t a marathon. The reason that even professional runners rarely run more than two marathons in a year becomes obvious once you’ve finished one—and then spent the next three days trying not to look silly while walking down stairs: The toll that a 26.2-mile race takes on your body is high. But whereas a half-marathon may not leave you with the delayed-onset muscle soreness and the month of suppressed immune function that a marathon does, it’s no light matter to race 13.1 miles, either, and recovering from today’s race should be taken seriously.
You won’t need anyone’s advice to do the first thing that you should do immediately after the race, especially in weather like today’s (warm and humid): Your thirst will tell you that you need to restore the water that you’ve lost by sweating. Sports drinks all have plenty of one major nutrient that’s also necessary to replenish after a long, hard effort: carbohydrates, which your muscles have been burning as fuel throughout the race. But it’s not as natural an urge to replace the other major nutrient that a hard race demands: the protein of which those muscles are made. It’s been found that eating or drinking some protein (20-30 grams or so) within a 30-to-60-minute window following a hard workout or race speeds muscle recovery by about 60 percent! There are sports drinks that include protein with the usual carbohydrates, and you could also get your serving of muscle-rebuilding protein at a post-race breakfast that includes milk or soy milk, other dairy products (yogurt, cottage cheese), eggs, or lean meats.
Another way to protect your muscles from any unnecessary damage after a half-marathon is to walk, rather than stop moving, just after you finish. Stiffness and soreness will be worse later if you limit circulation by sitting or lying down right away; your blood will bring more restorative oxygen to—and remove more waste products from—those muscles if you keep them moving after you cross the line.
Now that your race is over, we did promise you a day and a night on the town in the Big Apple (see Tip #7). That will probably keep you walking a bit; good meals will help, too—and yes, you no longer have to limit yourself to familiar foods. Maybe you could try a place that serves what those great Ethiopian, Japanese, or South American runners live on. But don’t stay out so late that you deprive yourself of sleep; that’s when your body will put all those nutrients to use to start the rebuilding process. If you can, try to get an extra hour of sleep for the next few days; you’ve definitely earned it, and you’ll bounce back more quickly.
A general rule for training after a hard race is: Wait one day per mile of the race before you race again. In other words, if you’d just raced a mile, you could run another race the next day—and that’s exactly what the Olympic Games sometimes demand that 1500-meter runners do in a preliminary heat and then the final. A half-marathon, by this rough guideline, deserves about 13 days of easy-to-moderate training before another serious effort. This will vary from runner to runner, and if you’ve treated your half-marathon not much differently than a weekly long run, you’ll know that you don’t need thirteen days before doing that run again. But if you’ve put on your racing flats and sliced every possible second off your time, two weeks may not be enough of a break to take before racing again.
Recovery comes more quickly if you do some daily light exercise than if you do nothing. If your legs clearly aren’t in the mood for more pounding, a couple of days of replacing your run with walking or cross-training on a bike, in a pool, or on a gym machine like an elliptical trainer or stationary cycle would do you good. Don’t push yourself—you just did that today, and you’ll be more likely to retain the fitness that you’ve built in your race preparations if you take the pressure off your workouts now but stay in the habit of regular exercise.
Look over your race results. Take the time to assess what you did right, and also where you could improve. Our guess is that this wasn’t your last big race.
