Hill Street Blues

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Post-event depression. It's an elephant in the room. We all know it's there but no-one really wants to be the one to talk about it. Almost everyone I know who runs longer distance events suffers from a mental drop after an event. I dunno what brings it about, something about cortisol levels after major adrenaline release, situational depressive episodes or "arrival fallacy", where the journey is more important than the outcome. Trail Runner magazine covered it a bit, but ultimately the over-riding opinion is it's just this thing that gets around. What I do know is that it sucks balls. I had it bad after Delirious earlier this year and I didn't even run!

To stave off what I knew was going to come (perhaps in a self fulfilling prophecy), I took on the challenge of an ultra marathon a month from August to December. Can't come crashing down if you never come down *taps head*.

Me post event

News flash: it didn't help. In fact, it's probably been a bit worse than usual. My first two events of Truth or Consequences and Birdie's Backyard were about 4 weeks apart. Mentally, Birdie was the harder of the two, and I felt that despite doing a distance PB I maybe could have done a little better in my preparation. Not that it was a failure by any means. There were just some things that lingered and played on my mind. Nutrition ... clothing ... pace ... just enough little doubts to nag away and make me question myself. This dragged me down and I lost a fair bit of enthusiasm. September's volume was down about 80km from August; I just couldn't be bothered going for long runs. I knew that I would have to increase my volume again to step up to the Feral Pig 50 miler I had planned in November which just set my nerves on edge and caused a kind of long run paralysis. So I made the call not to do Feral; to take a bit of time off and concentrate on getting myself set up for a quick 6 Inch marathon in December. When I made the call it was like a pressure release valve had been turned. Ahhhhhh ...

Consequently, it's been mostly shorter stuff for the last two months. It's been nice. I've achieved a bit:


Denmark Half Marathon. Not flat.

But the goal of the last few weeks has just to go out and enjoy the run again. It's slowly coming back. I did throw in my own fatass event a few weeks ago (48km), which was more a social long run with a lot of lulz. But I think that's the longest I'll run between now and 6". Dave Kennedy mentioned on Derpbook that he doesn't believe in running longer than 3 hours in training (leave the longer stuff for race day apparently), so I'm taking that bit of advice and running with it, so to speak. And I'm going to be kind to myself. I've run further and achieved more this year than I thought I would, and I'm not done yet. So if anyone needs me, I'll be out in the Porongorups...
 
Fatass for dat ass

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