28/04/2026
Great advice post marathon or any endurance event.
Recovering from a marathon? Focus on rest, nutrition and active recovery!
A recent Umbrella Review from Li et al. (2024) has found inconsistent results with passive strategies like massage and cryotherapy. Here’s what I would consider instead:
🗓️ Plan recovery into training - don’t rush back to running, rest this week and include active recovery to gently get things moving. Sometimes a ‘reverse taper’ can be useful - this involves gradually building training back toward goal levels over the next 3 to 4 weeks (like tapering but in reverse!). Going forward we might recommend that recovery days are included in the weekly schedule and recovery weeks are planned in roughly every 4 weeks where volume is reduced to address fatigue.
🧘🏻Mental wellbeing - training for a marathon can take over life for 4 to 6 months! Downtime away from the sport to relax and unwind can really help recharge the batteries!
😴 Sleep - 26.2 miles is a huge stress on the body, now is a good time to have some early nights and work on things that might disturb sleep such as stress, sleep environment or night time routine.
🥘 Nutrition - completing a marathon empties the tank, it’s time to re-fuel it! Research on over 1,000 marathon runners found 42.5% of female athletes and 17.6% of male athletes had low energy availability (Whitney et al. 2024). This needs to be addressed as a priority before building training.
Reference:
Li S, Kempe M, Brink M, Lemmink K. Effectiveness of Recovery Strategies After Training and Competition in Endurance Athletes: An Umbrella Review. Sports Med Open. 2024 May 16;10(1):55. doi: 10.1186/s40798-024-00724-6. PMID: 38753045; PMCID: PMC11098991.
