You’ve crossed the line, you’ve got the medal, and stairs have become a serious problem. Somewhere between the second slice of cake and trying to stand up off the sofa, the questions start: why does everything hurt more today than yesterday, why can’t you sleep, and how soon can you run again?
The honest starting point is that there’s no trick, supplement or gadget that meaningfully speeds up what your body is now doing. What you do get is a handful of sensible things to do, a shorter list worth avoiding, and some patience. Here are the questions runners actually ask in the week after a marathon, with straight answers.
What should I do in the first 15 minutes after I finish?
Keep walking. Ten to fifteen minutes of gentle movement before you sit down properly is the most useful thing you can do, and almost nobody does it.
You’ll hear this described as flushing out the lactic acid. That isn’t what’s happening. Lactate clears on its own within about an hour, and it was never what made you sore. The real reasons are simpler: walking stops blood pooling in your legs, which helps with the light-headedness so many people feel at the finish, and it stops you seizing up solid the moment you stop.
Two other things while you’re still in the finish area. Skip the static stretching, and get out of damp kit into dry layers before you get cold.
What should I eat and drink afterwards?
Something carb-rich within the first hour, then a proper meal with carbohydrate and protein in the couple of hours after. A milk-based drink is a good early option, giving you fluid, carbs and protein in one, and it goes down when solid food won’t. Add salt to that meal; you’ve lost plenty.
Beyond that, don’t overcomplicate it. Appetite after a marathon is unpredictable, and the most sensible advice we’ve seen from experienced marathoners is to eat what you’re craving. Drink to thirst rather than forcing litres down. By the next morning your urine should be a pale straw colour.
If you’re restocking gels and electrolyte tabs for the next block, our sports nutrition range is here. For this week, though, real food does most of the work.
Can I take ibuprofen after a marathon?
Worth getting right, because plenty of what’s written about this names the wrong organ.
Anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen are the ones to be careful with, and the concern is your kidneys. In a randomised, placebo-controlled trial across four 155-mile ultramarathons, published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2017, 89 runners took either 400mg of ibuprofen every four hours or a placebo. Around 44% developed acute kidney injury, and the ibuprofen group’s rate was 18 percentage points higher. As the lead author put it, for every five runners taking ibuprofen there was roughly one extra case.
That was an ultra, and the ibuprofen was taken during the race rather than after, so don’t read it as one tablet doing you harm. But the mechanism, reduced blood flow to the kidneys when you’re dehydrated and stressed, still applies in the hours after a marathon, when you’re at your most depleted.
Paracetamol is the usual alternative, and paracetamol is the one that carries the liver caution, so stick to the dose on the packet. If you’re reaching for something regularly, or you take other medication, ask a pharmacist rather than guessing.
The first 24 hours at a glance
| When | Try this | Avoid this |
|---|---|---|
| At the finish | Walk 10 to 15 minutes; get into dry layers | Sitting straight down; static stretching |
| First hour | Carb-rich snack or drink; start rehydrating | Waiting until you feel like eating |
| That afternoon | Carbs, protein and salt; a nap of up to 90 minutes | Anti-inflammatories; hours on your feet |
| That evening | A milk-based drink before bed; an early night | A heavy night, because alcohol dehydrates you further |
A celebratory pint won’t undo your training. A big session on legs that are already dehydrated and inflamed will make tomorrow noticeably worse.
Why couldn’t I sleep, and why did hunger wake me at 3am?
Both are normal, and both catch first-timers out.
The night after a marathon is often a bad one. Adrenaline and cortisol are still up, your legs ache in every position, and your head is replaying mile 20. It generally settles within two or three nights.
The hunger is stranger. Plenty of runners get woken in the small hours by it, having already eaten an enormous amount that day. You’ve run a big energy deficit and your appetite signalling is temporarily all over the place. Just as many find the opposite: no appetite at all for 24 hours. Neither is a problem.
If you can, nap on race afternoon rather than pushing through to a late night. Sleep is when the repair happens.
Why do I feel worse on day two?
Because that’s when soreness peaks. Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) arrives properly 24 to 48 hours after the effort, which is why day two beats the finish line for discomfort, and why going downstairs becomes the day’s main event.
Your quads take the worst of it. They’ve spent 26.2 miles braking on every stride, and that eccentric loading does more damage than pushing off does. Most people also describe a flat, foggy energy crash the day after. By day three or four it’s easing.
If aching legs are a regular feature of your training and not just a post-race thing, we’ve written separately on how to stop your legs aching after running.
Should I rest completely, or keep moving?
Keep moving, but don’t run.
Gentle activity beats the sofa. In a 2018 review of recovery methods in Frontiers in Physiology, active recovery showed a clear effect on soreness, larger than cold water immersion did. Walking is enough; an easy swim or gentle spin works too. Low impact, low effort.
The practical version: sit still all day and everything stiffens, until getting out of a chair in the evening becomes genuinely difficult. A short walk each afternoon for the first few days is worth more than any gadget.
Your feet won’t thank you for normal shoes for a while. This is the week of the year recovery sandals and flip flops earn their keep. Soft, wide, and no laces to bend down for. If you want the detail before you buy, here’s our review of the OOFOS recovery sandals we stock.
Do ice baths, compression and massage actually work?
Some help with how you feel. Very little changes how fast you repair, and that distinction matters.
That same 2018 review pooled results across a large number of studies:
| Method | What the evidence shows |
|---|---|
| Massage | The strongest effect of any method, on both soreness and perceived fatigue |
| Active recovery | Solid effect on soreness. Free, and no downside |
| Compression | A reasonable effect in that review, but a 2026 review specifically in endurance athletes rated the certainty of the evidence very low |
| Cold water immersion | Small but real effect on soreness |
| Static stretching | No measurable effect |
Two points of timing. An ice bath needs to be soon after finishing; days later, a warm bath is both more pleasant and more sensible, because by then you want blood flowing to the area. And don’t take the massage offered in the finish tent. Book one for three or four days afterwards, once the acute soreness has come off. If you’re wondering whether to make it a regular thing, we’ve covered where sports massage fits into injury prevention.
On stretching, the findings are consistent if not dramatic: a Cochrane review of ten trials found stretching before or after exercise had minimal or no effect on soreness in the days afterwards. Gentle mobility so you can move comfortably is fine, and our guide to the best stretches for running covers what’s worth doing once you’re training again. Hauling on a quad full of micro-damage in the meantime isn’t doing what you think.
If you want one thing for the first fortnight, a foam roller or massage stick is the most useful item on this list you can use at home. Gently, though, not as a punishment.
Do any supplements speed up recovery?
Not in any way that matters. Protein and carbohydrate do the work, and food provides both. Tart cherry juice and assorted recovery powders have some supporting studies, but the effects are small, inconsistent, and dwarfed by eating properly and sleeping.
My legs feel fine already. Do I need a break?
Yes, and this is the section that matters most.
Feeling recovered and being recovered run on different clocks. Soreness fades in three to seven days, but blood markers of muscle damage stay elevated longer than the ache does, and repair carries on after you’ve stopped noticing anything. Your legs stop complaining well before the job is finished.
Immune data illustrates it. In a study of 2,311 runners, around 13% reported illness in the week after the Los Angeles Marathon, against 2.2% of runners who trained but didn’t race. Worth a caveat: when researchers have looked for actual pathogens behind post-race symptoms, they’ve found them in only about half of cases, so some of this is likely inflammation rather than infection. Either way, something is still going on when your legs feel fine.
The trap is psychological rather than physical. You feel brilliant, you hit your goal, and you want to keep the momentum. As one experienced marathoner put it in a thread we read while writing this: the roads aren’t going anywhere. The gains from the block you’ve just finished are banked during recovery, not during the week you try to prove you’ve recovered.
When can I run again, and how much?
There’s no formula, and the popular rules of thumb prove it. One says an easy day for every mile raced, giving you 26 days. Another says a day per kilometre, giving you 42. When accepted guidance spans two and a half weeks, treat all of it as a rough steer.
What’s sensible:
- Days 1 to 3: no running. Walk, swim or spin if you want to.
- First marathon: a week before you run, minimum. There’s no prize for the comeback.
- Then a test run: 20 to 30 minutes, flat, genuinely easy. Judge it by how you feel the next morning, not during.
- The following two to three weeks: rebuild roughly the way you tapered down. No speedwork, no hills, no pace targets, no racing.
If something hurts on the test run, stop and give it a few more days. That isn’t lost fitness. It’s what stops a niggle becoming six weeks off.
This ache hasn’t gone after a week. Is it an injury?
Most post-marathon aches are just the marathon. Some aren’t, and the difference is usually easy to spot.
Almost certainly recovery: it’s in both legs, it’s a general ache rather than a point, it’s worse first thing and loosens as you move, and each day is better than the last.
Worth getting looked at: it’s on one side only, it’s sharp or you can put a finger on exactly where it is, it hasn’t improved at all after a week, it started during the race rather than after, or it’s changing how you walk. Bone pain in the shin, foot or heel that hurts when you press it deserves a proper opinion before you run on it at all.
If it’s your knee, our guide to the common running knee injuries will help you work out what you’re looking at. And if you think you’ve genuinely done something rather than just overcooked it, the first 48 hours matter more than most people realise.
If a niggle is hanging around, or the race exposed something you’d been managing through training, that’s what our gait analysis and biomechanical assessment is for. We look at how you actually move, not just where it hurts. Where the answer is support rather than a different shoe, custom insole fitting is the next step. Both are £30, redeemed against anything you buy, so effectively free if you leave with something. If you need hands-on treatment or podiatry instead, our in-store services page covers what’s available at each store.
Should I replace my shoes?
Quite possibly.
Sixteen weeks of training plus the race puts a lot of miles through one pair. The usual guidance is 500 to 800km, but treat that as a wide range rather than a number. How the shoe feels underfoot tells you more than the tracker does, and we’ve gone into this properly in how long running shoes last. If the cushioning feels dead, the upper has stretched, or you’re noticing impact you didn’t notice before, it’s done.
The mistake worth avoiding is running your comeback weeks in a pair that finished its life at the marathon, when your legs are least able to absorb it. If you’re due a new pair, our running shoes are worth trying on in person rather than reordering blind. Feet change over a marathon block, and so do the models.
Why do I feel so flat now it’s over?
Because months of structure vanished overnight. The post-marathon dip usually lands three to five days out, once the adrenaline’s gone and the group chat has moved on. It’s a normal part of the process.
One of the better answers we came across to “what do you do in the days after a race” was simply: I spend my time choosing my next race. Good for morale, and a trap if it becomes training for it straight away. Pick the race. Don’t start the block yet.
If you’re looking locally, the Portsmouth Coastal Waterside Marathon in December is far enough out to be realistic. And when you’re ready to think about the race itself rather than the recovery, our guide to running a marathon is where to pick things up.
If you’re unsure whether what you’re feeling is recovery or a problem, come and see us in Portsmouth or Christchurch, and bring the shoes you raced in. They usually tell us more than you’d expect.
Frequently asked questions
When can I race again after a marathon? Something short, like a 5K or parkrun with a bit of effort, is reasonable two to three weeks out if recovery has gone smoothly. Another marathon should be months, not weeks.
Can I walk parkrun this weekend? Walking it, yes, and it’s a nice way to keep moving. Running it six days after a marathon is how people end up injured in week three.
Will I lose a toenail? Possibly, especially after a warm race or one in shoes slightly too small. Leave it alone, keep it clean and dry, and let it come away on its own. If a toe is hot, swollen or increasingly painful, get it seen. Blisters under the big toe are the usual companion, and we’ve written about why those happen.
Is a sports massage worth booking, and when? It has the best evidence of any recovery method for how you’ll feel, so yes. Book it three or four days after the race rather than taking the one on offer at the finish.
