Race Day Anxiety and Post-Race Blues for Trail Runners

And in the taper piece, we'll talk about anxiety, race anxiety, and kind of like Kim was just touching on a lot of the things that we'll talk about.

In terms of the anxiety piece are really things that we have been working on all along.

So there's not much that you can do for race day anxiety.

That's going to be super effective if you haven't done anything leading up to now.

Um, so we'll touch on a couple of things, but, um, a lot of the race day anxiety work has already been done.

It's the stuff that you've been doing all along that mind body awareness, um, that you've been building that, um, that, Those distress tolerance skills, that connection with the self, all of that is related to how you're going to manage anxiety on race day.

So when we think about both taper tantrums, anxiety, post-race struggles, the most important tool that we have is acceptance.

So we're putting a little bit of effort into preventing it, but because we're accepting that most likely these things are going to come up and they're going to happen in some way, we're going to put most of our effort into loving ourselves through the experience.

So this is not going to be a lot of information on how to prevent the post-race blues or how to prevent anxiety from happening, right? It will be information about how to support yourself when you have the post-race blues or how to support yourself when you have anxiety.

So you're going to see that word acceptance over and over again.

And that's really, you know, this fundamental idea that these things that happen, these responses to taper, the response to an extensive endurance effort that leads to the post-race blues, those are normal and expected responses to what we're putting our body through we can accept that we can accept that because we're challenging ourselves it's going to be hard sometimes right and so the more that we can know that and accept it going in the better we're able to respond when we see the signs and signals of anxiety or of depression showing up and we can say oh i could expect this i knew this was happening and we have a more measured response to it So first up, we have the taper.

Now, if you're like most runners, you probably don't enjoy the taper very much.

The idea of like, do I have to do this, right? Does it really matter if I pull back the running for a couple weeks? And the answer is yes, it really matters.

You do have to do this.

have to do it if you want to have as good of a race as you can.

The taper period is a time for your body to get ready to race after it has endured the very intense training that you've put it through.

So you're going to use the taper time to repair muscle damage.

That's supposed to say restore glycogen stores.

Um, reduce your fatigue.

You're going to have actually an improved immunity during the taper time.

Um, you can't improve your fitness.

There's no reason to go out and do big workouts when you're supposed to be tapering.

Uh, you can try to convince yourself that you can improve your fitness, but you won't.

The only thing that you would be doing would be adding more stress.

So when you think, do I have to taper? Yes, this is how.