Anyone else suffer with depression after a race, good or bad? I just ran a half marathon PR a week ago, but now feel really down. Like I am still not fast enough, and that no matter how fast I ever run, it won’t change some pretty bad things (death and terminal illness in my family) that have happened in the last year.
Train harder and if all else fails find a Italian doctor.
Have a beer. Watch this, mfer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMqeMcIO_9w
At least you can run. I'm chasing dreams of playing in the MLS. Some stories I've read happened where the guy was college-bound, and expecting to be a pro before turning 20, but then he tore his hamstring multiple times. Three years, he suffered injuries and now he past his 20th birthday, and his soccer isn't what it's used to be.
You're injured free, and hopefully healthy, which means you can improve.
You gotta improve your attitude too, bruh.
I ran the fastest marathon i've ever run after months of a buildup earlier in the year. After the race i felt horribly depressed/ angry, tired, anxious for 3-4 weeks honestly. Months of flooding your body with endorphines and looking forward to that "big" day then having it come and go and not having much to look forward to can be hard. You gotta just move forward find more races and find a race far out to make as a big goal. sleep a lot it will catch your body up.
Very common. You've structured so much of your life around one goal, one event, one moment. Now, regardless of success or failure, that moment is gone. Your reason for living (to some degree), the thing that got you out of bed in the morning, is past. So now what's left to drive you?
This happens to athletes after a big competition, politicians after an election, businessmen after a big deal.
Use this time to reevaluate your life goals and priorities.
It is actually a good thing to have that feeling as long as it is not anything approaching clinical depression. You want to keep pushing yourself and are never satisfied. That is what will keep you running for years and years. It is the process not the results that are why we run. I used to run with a guy who had a monstrous amount of talent. He was a pure amateur and ran a 19 min 5k without any training on a dare from a friend. With some half decent training, he quickly broke 17. His goal was to break 15. It took him about a year and a half of training with some very fast guys until he did it. Then he quit. He just liked the accomplishment and had no interest in doing anything else with his running.
Art Vandelay the fake one wrote:
Very common. You've structured so much of your life around one goal, one event, one moment. Now, regardless of success or failure, that moment is gone. Your reason for living (to some degree), the thing that got you out of bed in the morning, is past. So now what's left to drive you?
This happens to athletes after a big competition, politicians after an election, businessmen after a big deal.
Use this time to reevaluate your life goals and priorities.
More than that, you spent months preparing for this goal that you thought would make you happy, change your life, make you important.
Then you reach that goal, and, well, you're the same old person with the same old problems. It didn't change your life or fix any of your problems. You still feel insignificant. "The goal" over promised and under delivered.
A guy the fake one wrote:
Art Vandelay the fake one wrote:
Very common. You've structured so much of your life around one goal, one event, one moment. Now, regardless of success or failure, that moment is gone. Your reason for living (to some degree), the thing that got you out of bed in the morning, is past. So now what's left to drive you?
This happens to athletes after a big competition, politicians after an election, businessmen after a big deal.
Use this time to reevaluate your life goals and priorities.
More than that, you spent months preparing for this goal that you thought would make you happy, change your life, make you important.
Then you reach that goal, and, well, you're the same old person with the same old problems. It didn't change your life or fix any of your problems. You still feel insignificant. "The goal" over promised and under delivered.
Yep, this. But I also wonder how much of it is a chemical imbalance, hormones, etc out of whack after a big race effort.
I can imagine that this is quite common. At least it happened to me before. You work very hard for a goal, you reach it but nothing else changes.
Give yourself some time. You are exhausted from reaching your goal and your body and mind needs some rest.
Take it a little easier in your training and/or go for a fun race in the near future.
As others have stated, this is completely normal after everything you have been pouring your life into for the past several months is behind you.
Now is a great time to get reacquainted with your spouse, rededicate yourself to quiet time, and sign up for a new race (of course).
Here is a great study that I have done:
http://www.savannahnavigators.com/uploads/4/9/4/3/49437375/lessonsonassurance.pdf
And a great couples devotional that I haven't done but is recommended:
https://www.marriagetoday.com/daveandashleywillis/documents/31DayMarriageDevotional.pdf
Only in the last hundred years have people assumed that the default human setting is happiness. Maybe the way you feel right now is exactly what your baseline emotion in life is going to be. After all, we will all eventually be dead. All our striving is wind blown dust that is lost in the turning of history.
Setting goals and striving for them is what you do to make life livable. The actual achieving of the goals is not the point. It is the process of striving after the best version of yourself that lets you live out a virtuous life and fulfill your purpose.
So set another running goal and go after it. But know that ultimately, running is not the end all be all of your purpose. It is just something you get to do on the side. For your real purpose, you need to be investing in the lives of others. And ideally you can understand that you have a relationship with your Creator and you can find rest in that reality.
No matter how fast you run, there is someone with a faster PR. And even if your PR was the WR, then you would just wonder if you could run faster. So your PR will always leave you wanting more. It is both satisfying and unsettling at the same time.
You really have to have something else in your life to give you purpose. And to have any satisfaction from your running accomplishments, you have to have contemplated before hand, what you are really trying to achieve and why.
The greatest runners, and the greatest people, can set this balance between contentment and drive.
I've run 2 marathons and one 50k and have felt post race depression after all of them. I was thrilled with the result for all 3, but I believe that it was purely how physically arduous they were contributed to chemical imbalance. My best advice is to not do anything too impulsive and just try to take things a bit easier for a while.
If you want to change your mood, you might try either cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness medication. There's plenty of solid evidence that both can help you change the ways of thinking that can turn even a PR into a mood killer. Basically, both approaches help you to get some perspective on your thinking.
There are plenty of books that can help you learn enough about these techniques to start to use them to turn your mood around. Here are some that people have found useful: David Burns, "Feeling Good: The new mood therapy," Dennis Greenberger, "Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think," Sharon Salzberg, "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation," Victor Davich, "8 Minute Meditations: Quiet Your Mind, Change Your Life."