How to Recover From a Marathon Fast

Audio Transcript

Fisher: Hello everybody. This week’s question is about recovering from a marathon.

All right today’s question comes from Nathan.

His question is, “After my recent marathon, I stretched, took ice baths and rolled out my entire body during the two days after the race, but still feel very sore and tight in my quads. What should I eat and do in order to expedite this recovery?”

First of all, you’re doing exactly what you need to do.

You need to take ice baths, stretch and roll out; light rolling for sure. Some other things you could do would be, go and get a massage in three to five days post marathon to help flush that waste product out.

Like I said, you’re already doing what you do need to do.

Main thing that needs to be done is just rest and allow your body the time to recover, and dig itself back out of that well that you put it in, with running 26.2 miles.

In my opinion, I think it would take upwards of a week to 10 days to flush out all that soreness.

There’s workouts that I do where I’m sore for two days, so if you are only two or three days post marathon, I would expect you to continue to be sore for a couple more days.

You can go for some light active exercise, like a walk, or do some yard work, or go for a bike ride.

Those are the kinds of things that get that blood flow moving through there a little bit quicker, as well as increase speed or recovery.

Like I said, medicine is always the best rest and that’s what’s needed coming off a marathon.

That’s obviously why the marathon is the target race and there’s nothing after that. You need to spend two or three weeks to compensate for what you put the body through, and also compensate for the training cycle you’ve put it through, both mentally and physically.

Let’s go over and break down what actually happens during a marathon, or any kind of long repetitive exercise, starting with the skeletal system.

There’s a lot of damage to the skeletal muscle. A marathon significantly impacts your ability to come back the next couple of days and produce a lot of power, and your muscles aren’t as durable just because you’re still broken down basically.

A lot of those muscle sheaths have tears in them, which is where the soreness comes from.

This could last up to 10 to 14 days as well, so we are to definitely expect after each marathon, to have no less than two weeks of easy training, light workouts.

With my personal coaching clients, it’s usually one week of total rest, and then one week of maybe a third of the mileage they were doing in running easy or running every other day, or every third day, depending on how they are, their injury history, and stuff like that.

Part two of what happens in a marathon is what happens on a cellular level, and these are the kind of things that are still going on.

You’re not sore anymore after a couple of days after a marathon, so you think you can get out and start training hard again, but these are some of the stuff that happens on a cellular level; on a metabolic level.

You can’t really detect unless you go to a doctor and they get blood samples and you can see that stuff still in your blood.

A lot of the creatine and stuff like that, where your body’s still trying to figure out what you did to it in and recover.

The biggest thing is a depressed immune system, putting your body through 26.2 miles, three to six hours of very intense running, really depresses the immune system which would cause, it really opens you up for an opportunity to catch an illness, a cold, or some kind of virus.

Those kind of risk goes through the roof for the next 72 hours after a race or the next three to five days.

Again, it’s crucial to rest as much as you can, get a lot of nutrient, eat rich and dense foods and make sure you’re not exercising, but I would still make sure you’re hydrating a lot.

You have all that waste product in your muscles and you’ve got to flash it out somewhere.

Hydrating, using the rest room as much as possible, all of that to help clear out those muscles to regenerate and recover.

Again, as much we’d all like to get out there and start running, and training for the next marathon, a couple of days after the previous marathon, it’s not wise or smart to do that.

With that being said, I think to be on the safe side is always key, so that anywhere between five and fifteen upwards of three weeks, would be the best way to recover from a marathon just to be on the safe side.

The general rule that I’ve always heard is for each mile race, you need one day of recovery.

A marathon would be 26 days, whereas a 5K would be three or four days on tops, so that gives you some kind of idea and general rule to guideline to go by.

That’s all I have for today’s question.

I hope that answers that and gives you some insight on to how to recover, and how not to get back into structured training too quickly.

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