I’ve never gotten the post race blues. What tends to happen is the opposite, which is that I get so inspired from racing that I get back to training too quickly. That’s why I needed to exercise some self-restraint to keep my runs short and far in between. Specifically, I only did two 5K runs during the week and swapped Saturday’s long run to a 2.5 hour mountain bike ride.

On Sunday, I did a 13K easy run that revealed that taking it easy had been the right choice. Towards the end of that run, I feel a lot of fatigue and even experienced some cramping, which would have never happened if I didn’t have the 50K effort on my legs from the previous weekend. Anything I’d done before that run during the week felt easy and normal, but the 13K run was a sufficient stimulus to reveal the latent fatigue.

Because of that fatigue, I’m going to take another down week. It’s not an easy thing to do given my high level of excitement about the weeks ahead. At the same time, I know very well that the crucial weeks of this training block are still months away, and that the main goal for now is to stay uninjured and gradually build up the capacity to handle the upcoming heavy load.